Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East

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. (Apr.)