Public Biography
Tariq El-Amin is the international affairs correspondent for The New York Time5, covering diplomacy, foreign policy, trade agreements, and global institutions. He is based in Washington but travels frequently and has filed from thirty-one countries.
Mr. El-Amin holds a degree in international relations from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a Master of International Affairs from Sciences Po in Paris. He is fluent in English, Arabic, and French, and reads Spanish and Turkish with what he describes as “sufficient competence to understand a foreign ministry communiqué, which is rarely sufficient to understand what the foreign ministry actually means.”
Before joining The New York Time5 in 2020, he spent seven years at Reuters, where he served as a correspondent in Beirut and later in Brussels, covering the European Union’s institutional machinery. He previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a research analyst, which he has described as “excellent preparation for journalism, because it taught me that even people who study a problem full-time frequently disagree about what the problem is.”
Mr. El-Amin was born in Dearborn, Michigan, to a Lebanese-American father who owns a construction supply company and a Jordanian-born mother who teaches Arabic literature at Wayne State University. He was raised bilingually and has noted that “growing up between two languages gives you an instinct for the gap between what people say and what they mean, which is the entire substance of diplomacy.”
He lives in the District of Columbia with his wife, a Foreign Service officer, and their daughter.
Selected Coverage
- Exclusive reporting on the U.N. General Assembly’s emergency session on international roundabout standardization
- A three-part series on how NATO’s procurement process handles office supply disputes
- “The Treaty Nobody Read” — coverage of a bilateral memorandum of understanding between the United States and Luxembourg that was signed, filed, and immediately lost