Grand Delusion
The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“A comprehensive, even magisterial review . . . This is strong stuff, but Simon does not flinch.” —Foreign Affairs
A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East
The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the region shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.”
Reagan fired the starting gun on decades of deepening American involvement, but as the global economy grew, bringing an increasing reliance on oil, U.S. diplomatic and military energies were ever more fatefully absorbed by the Middle East. Grand Delusion explores the motivations, strategies, and shortcomings of each presidential administration from Reagan to today, exposing a web of intertwined events—from the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict amid Israeli domestic politics, Cold War rivalries, and Saudi Arabia’s quest for security, to 9/11 and the war on terror—managed by a Washington policy process frequently ruled by wishful thinking and partisan politics.
Simon’s sharp sense of irony and incisive writing brings complex history to life. He illuminates the motives behind America's commitment to Israel; explodes the popular narrative of Desert Storm as a “good war”; and calls out the devastating consequences of our mistakes, particularly for people of the region trapped by the onslaught of American military action and pitiless economic sanctions.
Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, has too often been tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates American's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hubris regularly begets disaster in this astringent history of American policy in the Middle East since 1980, in which former State Department official Simon (coauthor, The Sixth Crisis) surveys decades of American successes and failures in the region. The latter far outnumber the former and include the Reagan administration's secret, illegal arms sales to Iran; George W. Bush's Iraq War, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths; Donald Trump's self-defeating repudiation of Obama's Iran nuclear deal, which ended up accelerating Iran's nuclear program; and many feckless stabs at an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. The author highlights persistent dysfunction in U.S. policy, including a tendency to resort to military coercion, policymakers' rejection of lower-level experts who contradict their theories, and "a superimposition of grand ideas on antithetical Middle Eastern realities." Stocked with sharply etched portraits of statesmen, Simon's narrative elucidates complex issues in pithy, biting prose. (On the Iran-Iraq War: "Equally jarring is the idea that both the United States and the Soviet Union were supporting Iraq only because the prom queen—Iran—had spurned them.") Simon's insider savvy and bracing honesty make for an illuminating take on America's vexed relationship with the region.
