Middle East

Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East

BY PHILIP H. GORDON.

St. Martin’s Press, 2020, 368 pp.

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

BY TIMOTHY MITCHELL. Verso, 2011, 288 pp.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017

BY RASHID KHALIDI. Metropolitan Books, 2020, 326 pp.

Cities of Salt

BY ABDELRAHMAN MUNIF. TRANSLATED BY PETER THEROUX. Random House, 1987, 627 pp.

Zaat: The Tale of One Woman’s Life in Egypt During the Last 50 Years

BY SONALLAH IBRAHIM. TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY CALDERBANK. American University in Cairo Press, 2001, 344 pp.

The last century was not kind to the Middle East. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I secured European control of the region, disrupting local political and economic arrangements and inserting a variety of alien interests and agendas. Chief among these were the Zionist settlements that would lead to the creation of Israel and the global military-industrial demand for oil that gave rise to local power brokers in the guise of royal dynasties in Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Levant. The succession of the United States to global primacy and the formal independence of the largely European-designed states in the region after World War II obscured but did not end the region’s extraordinarily circumscribed integration into world affairs. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, regional development was sacrificed to Washington’s desire for secure access to oil, the security of Israel, and the containment of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War produced a surge of U.S. interest in “democracy promotion,” driven by the conviction that liberal values contributed to the triumph over the Soviet Union. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 refocused U.S. attention to what became known as the “global war on terror,” an apparently unending battle against jihadist violence and Islamist political ambitions. The upheavals of the Arab uprisings in the second decade of the twenty-first century took everyone by surprise but ultimately changed little in U.S. policy, which continued to prize the Gulf ’s oil, Israel’s security, and regional stability, even if those imperatives buttressed political autocracy and contributed to economic stagnation.

Not surprisingly, no single book captures this history. Mitchell, however, delivers a valuable analysis of just why the United States felt the need to micromanage the region’s politics: the powerful pull of oil has left Western democracy contingent on an undemocratic Middle East. Gordon provides a clear and candid recounting of decades of repeated U.S. failure to remake the