Timothy Naftali (born January 31, 1962) is a Canadian American historian who is clinical associate professor of public service at New York University.

He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev.

He is a regular CNN contributor as a CNN presidential historian.

Naftali was born in Montreal and at one point worked as an aide to Robert Bourassa. In 2007, he told the Toronto Star that he left Canada for the US in response to Quebec's language laws:

It seemed to me that the deck was stacked against civil liberties and I preferred to be in a country where I didn't have to worry about what language I spoke.

He earned his undergraduate degree from Yale, and later obtained graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard.

Naftali's area of focus was the history of counterterrorism and the Cold War. Before becoming director of the Nixon Library in 2007, Naftali had been an associate professor at the University of Virginia, where he directed the Miller Center of Public Affairs' Presidential Recordings Program. In the 1990s, he taught at the University of Hawaii and Yale University.

He served as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, which commissioned him to write an unclassified history of American counterterrorism policy. This was later expanded into his 2005 book Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.