Losing the Long Game
The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
One of Foreign Affairs' Best of Books of 2021 and "Books For The Century"!
"Book of the Week" on Fareed Zakaria GPS
Financial Times Best Books of 2020
The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades—and why it always seems to go wrong.
"It's a first-rate work, intelligently analyzing a complex issue, and learning the right lessons from history."
—Fareed Zakaria
Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade—in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before.
Philip H. Gordon's Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the U.S. experience with regime change over the past seventy years, and an insider’s view on U.S. policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated U.S. interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gordon (France, Germany, and the Western Alliance), a former assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, delivers a well-informed overview of America's recent interventions in the Middle East. Noting that the U.S. has attempted Middle East regime change about once a decade since the end of WWII, Gordon reveals that even apparent successes, such as the overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (a "fierce nationalist" overhyped by the Eisenhower administration as a communist threat, according to Gordon) in 1953 and the arming of Afghan rebels to drive out the Soviet Army in the 1980s, have backfired. He also describes Obama's options during the Arab Spring as limited or simply bad, and argues that proposals to launch air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria were "another case of advocates of regime change putting their faith more in hope than logic or experience." He blames President Trump's failures in Syria on disinterest, bad choices, and a fear of antagonizing a resurgent Russia. Each case study is well documented and straightforward, though there are notable gaps, including infrequent mentions of Israel, despite the significance of the U.S.-Israeli relationship to American policy in the Middle East. Still, this is a decent primer on a complex and significant aspect of world affairs.
