America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region

Lynch, among the most prominent American political scientists working on the Middle East, offers a furious critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region since the end of the Cold War. He argues that the heady ambitions of the unipolar moment permitted American policymakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, to pursue the imposition of a U.S.-centric order without the resolution of the central conflict in the region—that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Indeed, he suggests that the dispute was prolonged by the U.S. commitment to a “peace process” that was, in fact, all process and no peace, which served only to prolong U.S. involvement in the region and justify Washington’s indispensability. The failure to recognize the urgency of the Palestinian issue inevitably led to policies that ignored regional public opinion, undermined putative democracy promotion efforts, propped up autocrats, and required several U.S. military interventions to put down increasingly violent eruptions of popular discontent from Iraq and Syria to Libya and beyond. Lynch does pull some punches; he insists that these U.S. policymakers are talented, earnest, and knowledgeable, and yet they are the authors of monumental blunders and disastrous policies, including, in Lynch’s well-documented view, advocating a ruinous invasion of Iraq and supporting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza.