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.”
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 False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East and The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square, which won the 2012 Gold Medal from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Cook is also the author of the recently published Oxford University Press book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.