The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present and Future in the Middle East by Steven Cook, Oxford University Press, 2024
In the third of the three Godfather movies, Al Pacino, playing Michael Corleone, laments his inability to make a complete break with the family’s criminal past: “Just when I thought I was out,” he exclaims bitterly, “they pull me back in.”
Americans can be forgiven for feeling the same way about the Middle East. In response to the costly failures throughout the wider region – the war in Afghanistan (not geographically part of the Middle East but close to it and similar in cultural and political terms), the war in Iraq, and the unsuccessful campaign to spread democracy to the undemocratically-governed countries there – the last three American presidents have attempted to reduce US involvement. Yet none of them succeeded. The unexpected capture of territory by Islamic fundamentalists, the sudden rise of oil prices in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the attacks on Israel by terrorist organizations to its north and south beginning on October 7, 2023 have pulled America back into the turmoil of the region’s affairs.
Can the United States steer a middle course between these two patterns – between costly over-engagement and dangerous aloofness? In The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the case that it can. The better approach, he says, is one that the United States has followed, with good results, in the past.
In the quarter-century after Great Britain left the Middle East in the late 1960s and the United States became enmeshed in the politics of the region, American policy sought to ward off threats to its principal interests there. Then, beginning in the 1990s, it invested blood and treasure in attempts to transform Middle Eastern governments in accordance with American political values. The first approach succeeded; the second failed.
The United States, Cook argues persuasively, should therefore return to the approach of the first period. Then, the United States had three goals: ensuring the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world: preventing a single hostile power – be it the Soviet Union, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, or Iraq under Saddam Hussein – from dominating the region (and therefore its oil); and ensuring the survival of the state of Israel. It achieved all three.
One example, among several that could be cited, was the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. To keep the rabidly anti-Western theocratic regime to which the 1979 Iranian Revolution had given rise from scoring a decisive victory and thus placing itself in a position to exercise hegemony in the Middle East, the United States provided assistance to Iraq. In order to ensure the continuing flow of oil, it gave American protection to tankers carrying petroleum from Kuwait and struck Iranian military assets.
These measures thwarted Iran and assured supplies of oil to the West, but at the cost of compromising American political values by siding with the murderous Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In the first period, the United States subordinated its values to its interests. In the second, the principal purpose of American Middle East policy became the promotion of precisely those values. In this second era, beginning in the mid-1990s, the efforts to install decent, competent, democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well outside the Middle East in Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo, claimed the attention and the resources of the foreign policy of the United States. (This is the theme of my 2016 book Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.) These efforts failed because all of the societies involved lacked the social, political, economic and cultural foundations on which the kind of government the United States sought to foster must rest: they lacked, that is, the appropriate experiences, institutions, skills, and values.
Two lessons for American Middle East policy emerge from this history: blocking dangers to American interests is desirable and feasible; installing institutions that embody American values, while no doubt desirable, is seldom if ever feasible – at least not at a price the American public is willing to pay.
To put it succinctly: prevention, yes; transformation, no.
How should these lessons be applied going forward? The country that now threatens American interests is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is conducting an active campaign to achieve dominance in the region by unseating governments friendly to the United States and evicting American forces from the Middle East. That campaign has met with considerable success. Iran now exercises substantial, indeed sometimes dominant, influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Still, the most important Arab countries remain friendly to the United States and Israel’s armed forces have, since October 7, 2023, seriously weakened two Iranian clients – Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
If, however, the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear weapons, as it is actively seeking to do, its capacity to harm America’s friends and American interests would expand dramatically. The most important task for American Middle East policy is, therefore, to prevent that from happening. This is especially the case insofar as the American government actively discouraged Israel from hitting Iran’s nuclear installations in its recent retaliatory air strikes on Iran. Blocking an Iranian bomb will require, at the least, mounting a credible threat to use force if Iran takes the final steps in building working nuclear weapons, and attacking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities if that threat does not achieve its aim. Crippling the Iranian nuclear weapons program would not require repeating the unhappy experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq because American ground troops would not be needed; naval and air power would suffice.
Past American Middle Eastern policy has another implication for the future. For decades, successive American administrations pursued a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians living in Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. These efforts all failed, and for the same reasons that American democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East came to nothing: the political, cultural, and institutional bases for a Palestinian state willing to live peacefully beside Israel have never existed, and the United States cannot create them.
If, in the wake of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, the relevant Palestinians somehow undergo a political transformation that makes a durable settlement possible (and leaving aside the question of how the Israelis can be assured that such a transformation has in fact taken place), the United States could profitably lend its assistance, along with other countries, to bringing about such a settlement. Absent, however, the Palestinians becoming what they have thus far never been – a genuine partner for peace – the American government should waste no more time on what has come, over the years, to be called the peace process. The United States has more urgent Middle Eastern business, business that can, and must, be successfully concluded, with Iran.
