America’s Middle East

Description

After Hamas’ shocking 2023 attack on Israel, the United States stood firmly behind Israel’s near-genocidal war on Gaza, despite widespread moral outrage and significant damage to Washington’s global agenda. But Gaza is only the latest paradox in thirty-five years of Middle East policy. How did this pattern develop, why can’t policymakers learn from repeated Middle Eastern calamities, and what does Gaza’s destruction mean for America’s place in the world?

Marc Lynch charts the United States’ disastrously failed approach to the post–Cold War Middle East, where aspirations for US leadership and a calm region have only produced war, instability and humanitarian catastrophe. Lynch exposes the failure of each president’s efforts to transform the Middle East in America’s image, or pivot away from the region; Washington’s refusal to take seriously the views of Middle Easterners; and its fantasy of forging a regional order ‘without’ the Palestinian issue.

Moving between American politics and Middle Eastern realities, this incisive account explains why US policy has not changed despite its horrifying human costs, from Iraq, Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen and Libya.

Reviews

‘An excellent, unflinchingly honest account of what every Arab knows: America’s policies and dominance in the Middle East have provoked untold disasters, based on a deep-rooted culture of racism and colonialism. The world needs this book, now more than ever.’ — Fida Jiryis, author of Stranger in My Own Land: Palestine, Israel and One Family’s Story of Home

‘This remarkable, aching book holds up a mirror to all among us who had a hand in, or passively watched, US policy. The picture reflected is appalling. America’s Middle East, Lynch says, was born of rage. His is of the good, healthy, necessary kind.’ — Robert Malley, former Middle East advisor to Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden, and co-author of Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine

‘Illuminating. For anyone interested in Middle East politics, Lynch offers the first detailed analysis of America’s powerfully institutionalised regional order. An amazingly important and timely critique of US supremacy since the 1990s, and its culmination in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.’ — Dina Matar, Chair of the Centre for Global Media and Communications, SOAS University of London, and co-editor of Gaza as Metaphor

Author(s)

Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science and Director of Middle East Studies at The George Washington University, founder of the Abu Aardvark blog, and author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East and The New Arab Wars: Anarchy and Uprising in the Middle East.