The Foreign Policy Mistake the U.S. Keeps Repeating in the Middle East

The implosion of Obama’s vision—and his replication
of Cold War–era American policies that ran roughshod over human rights in the
Middle East—serves as a sharp illustration of the dynamic that Fawaz A. Gerges
outlines in his new book, What
Really Went Wrong. The title is a sly allusion to a work by the late
historian Bernard Lewis, What
Went Wrong? In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Lewis’s slim
volume became a surprise international bestseller, selling in huge numbers not
just in the U.S. but in places like Denmark and Italy. In Lewis’s view,
radicalized Muslims attacked America because they wrongly blamed us for the
failings of the Islamic civilization to adapt to the modern world. Its author
advised the Bush administration about the benefits certain to accrue if the
United States invaded Iraq, permanently tarnishing his reputation.

Gerges, a professor at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, tells a very different story. In his account,
the sources of anger at the United States in Muslim-majority countries, and the
woeful situation in Arab lands, stem from postwar American foreign policy—particularly
that of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, which lasted from 1953 to 1961. During
those tense, youthful Cold War years, Ike made fateful decisions to defy the
wishes of the bulk of the population in Iran and Egypt, rejecting their governments
and marginalizing their leaders. At a time when much of the region was
asserting independence from colonial rule, the U.S. decisively intervened in these
two critical countries in the name of anti-Communist paranoia, to the detriment
of their long-term economic and democratic development. “America’s post–World
War II imperial ambitions and its offensive conduct in the early decades of the
global Cold War trigged something resembling a geostrategic curse in the Middle
East,” Gerges writes. 

In 2024, the U.S. faces some of the same challenges in the Middle East that it did in 1954: Our
allies are repressive and unpopular with their own people, while hostile leaders
benefit by antagonizing the United States. As a guide to some of the worst
policymaking of the Cold War, Gerges’s book is instructive, though far from
groundbreaking. As a jumping off point for better U.S. policy in the future, however,
it is sometimes perplexing, often missing a sense of the range of factors that
shaped policy on the ground and proffering unsound solutions. In order to think
about resetting American policy in this region, we need to clearly understand
the dangers of aligning ourselves with autocrats—even ones that are anti-colonial
and popular.