Does America have a Future in the Middle East?
Steven A Cook, 11 November 2024 15.00 GMT Online
Following a long series of catastrophic misadventures in the Middle East over the last two decades, the American foreign policy community has tried to understand what went wrong. After weighing the evidence, they have mostly advised a retreat from the region. The basic view is that when the United States tries to advance change in the Middle East, it only makes matters worse.
But with conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, complex and critically important relationships with key regional players like Saudi Arabia and the myriad ways in which the region is linked to global geopolitical, economic and security issues, is withdrawal really an option for the United States?
This event will explore the challenges that policymakers, analysts and the incoming President of the United States must confront in developing a new strategy for the United States in the Middle East, this against the backdrop of a changing global order and America’s changing interests in the region.
Steven A. Cook is Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Cook is the author of the recently published book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East among several other titles.
Cook is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and prior to joining CFR, was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution (2001–02) and a Soref research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1995–96).
The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East
In this book, Cook argues that while analysts are rightly concerned that engagement drains U.S. resources and distorts its domestic politics, the broader impulse to disengage tends to neglect important lessons from the past. Moreover, advocates of pulling back overlook the potential risks of withdrawal.
Covering the relationship between the United States and the Middle East since the end of World War II, Cook makes the bold claim that despite setbacks and moral costs, the United States has been overwhelmingly successful in protecting its core national interests in the Middle East. Conversely, overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage U.S. power not only ended in failure, but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways.