What accounts for the democratic backsliding that has been the dominant global trend of this 21st century? One explanation lies in US policy in the Middle East, a region it has long dominated. The US has consistently supported autocratic and authoritarian regimes, preferred military to diplomatic solutions and made a mockery of its own rhetoric about human rights and a rule-based international order. Its backing for the Israeli genocide in Gaza is only the latest episode in this story. With the election of its own authoritarian leader, Donald Trump, the US no longer even pretends to support democratic ideals in the region.
Meanwhile, American policies in the Middle East help explain the erosion of democracy within the US itself. Disillusioned veterans of the US’s forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were disproportionately represented among January 6th insurrectionists and in the Maga movement more broadly. Crackdowns on academics and students seen to criticise Israel have constituted an attack on academic freedom more serious than anything since the McCarthy era. While they began under Joe Biden, Trump has seized on the supposed threat of anti-Semitism (equated with criticism of Israeli genocide) to launch an unprecedented assault on American universities.
Marc Lynch’s America’s Middle East offers an excellent analysis of how the Middle East – and the US – arrived at this point. The book was written in a white-hot rage at American support for Israeli genocide, for which the US supplied the necessary bombs and bullets. Yet Lynch’s main purpose is not to condemn but to understand. His perspective emerges from his life-long focus on Middle Eastern politics. His total command of regional politics makes him ideally placed to understand American policy. Viewing it from a vantage other than Washington enables him to understand the persistent mistakes that the US makes.
Lynch argues that the US suffers from a form of imperial myopia, consistently failing to understand the consequences of its actions in the region. His account is “an object lesson in the perils of unipolarity – and the temptations of primacy – trap – that other great powers have fallen into again and again over the centuries and to which America did not prove immune”.
America’s Middle East by Marc Lynch: An excellent and angry analysis of an American mess
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In particular, Washington always misunderstands and underrates the importance of Arab public opinion. It fails to understand widespread suspicion of the US as historically grounded. Most infamously, the George W Bush administration portrayed the 9/11 attacks as simple fanatical hatred. Actually, there was widespread revulsion in the region at US support for Israel, American military bases in Saudi Arabia and the harsh and deadly sanctions it imposed upon Iraq in the 1990s.
US refusal “to understand the region it seeks to control” is structural. For if the US were to grasp the grievances of Arab opinion it would have to change its actions.
The US cannot support democracy in the Middle East because democratic regimes would express popular dissent with US policy such as discontent at how Israel (with full American backing) oppresses Palestinians. Thus, the US supports autocratic regimes and dismisses Arab public opinion as irrelevant and irrational. Fundamentally it fails to value Arab lives equally to American ones. From its sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s to the recent destruction of Gaza, American policymakers have not been deterred by mass death, starvation and immiseration. And yet, as Lynch shows, it is American policymakers’ ignorance and contempt for the region’s peoples that lead it to commit the same mistakes again and again.
Lynch dates the formation of America’s Middle East to the end of the cold war, though he is certainly aware that US influence in the region predates this period and builds on structures of colonial rule inherited from the British and the French. But it was only after the cold war that American primacy in the region went unchallenged and US military presence became so palpable. According to Andrew Bacevich, before 1990 hardly any American soldiers died in the greater Middle East; since then, hardly any American soldiers have died anywhere else.
Lynch does not argue that the US is responsible for everything bad that has happened in the Middle East since, but he does contend that US primacy has structured the region’s politics to disastrous effect. During this time, he writes, “almost every Arab country outside the Gulf has become poorer, less stable and less free, threatened by more terrorism and burdened by more refugees”.
Lynch offers a detailed narrative of US policy in the region, from the Gulf War to the Iraq War to the war on Gaza. Though recognising changes in American policy – George HW Bush was unwilling to overthrow Saddam Hussein, while his son made it his mission to do so – Lynch emphasises broad continuities. He largely dismisses the chances for genuine peace to come out of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s when the US was determined (in the words of a leading American negotiator) to be “Israel’s lawyer” instead of finding a settlement that would produce a truly independent Palestinian state.
The one moment when the US had a chance to break with its previous patterns came during the Obama administration. Winning the Democratic nomination because of his opposition to the Iraq War, Barack Obama had a better appreciation than any other American president of the costs of the US’s Middle Eastern policies. When the protests of the Arab Spring broke out, Obama saw an opportunity to democratise the region. And yet Obama found himself trapped by the structures previous presidents had made. His efforts were undermined by considerable domestic opposition as well as by the US’s allies in the region – Israel and the Gulf states, which actively oppose democratisation efforts as inimical to their interests. In the end Obama acceded in the coup that overthrew Egypt’s elected government in 2013. As in so many other cases, the Obama presidency failed to live up to its promise.
Obama’s other significant attempt to restructure the region came with the nuclear deal he brokered with Iran over the objections of the Israeli government. But, Obama’s deal was quickly overturned by his successor, Donald Trump, largely out of personal spite. Under Trump the US dropped any pretence of supporting democracy and human rights in the region. At least you can no longer say the US is hypocritical.
Especially during his second term, Trump has conducted Middle Eastern policy with spectacular corruption, seeking to enrich himself and his family. He has accepted a jet worth $400 million as a personal gift from Qatar. And yet, other than a desire to avoid any further ground wars in the region, Trump’s policies have been largely in keeping with his predecessors. And, while no one should mistake Trump’s brokered ceasefire in Gaza with a genuine lasting peace, more blame for the Israeli genocide in Gaza lies at Joe Biden’s feet.
America’s Middle East can make for repetitive reading at times, but that is not so much the fault of the author as that of American policy itself, which frequently repeated the same blunders. A broader criticism of the book is that it downplays the US’s material interests in the region. American Middle Eastern policy may have been irrational from the perspective of its larger national interests, while being perfectly rational in serving the interests of oil companies and weapons manufacturers. One doesn’t need to resort to conspiracy theories or vulgar Marxism to recognise that these industries have played a key role in setting American policy in the region.
In addition, the book’s focus on the Middle East can at times occlude connections to American policy elsewhere. It seems strange to examine the war in Iraq as part of the global war on terror without looking at what happened in Afghanistan. And Obama’s Middle East initiatives need to be understood as part of his broader strategy of countering China’s rise, seeking to extricate the US from the Middle East in order to pivot towards Asia. While much of what Lynch writes about individual topics will be unsurprising to expert audiences, he has effectively synthesised these into a single volume. Overall, America’s Middle East is compelling and timely.
Lynch ends on a pessimistic note. With the growing power of the Gulf states and the rise of China, Lynch concludes that American primacy in the region is coming to a close. It should not be mourned. And yet what replaces it might be even worse. If there are any grounds for optimism, they lie in changing American public opinion towards Israel.
Israeli genocide in Gaza, communicated in daily visceral videos of atrocity, has made a lasting impression, especially among young voters. It seems unlikely that the Democratic Party will again nominate a president so willing to back Israel as was Biden. A future Democratic administration may well see a real shift in American policy towards the region, one that genuinely supports democracy and human rights. Such an administration just might break the vicious circle between authoritarianism abroad and at home.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor in US history at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
Tomorrow is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
Macmillan, 2025
Veteran Palestinian and American negotiators explain how empty rhetoric about a “two-state solution” has helped perpetuate Israel oppression, and outline what a genuine lasting peace would entail.
America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier
By Robert Vitalis
Verso, 2009
Israel hasn’t been the only long-time close ally of the US in the Middle East. This book offers an account of how the US came to be so close with the Saudi royal family and the oil interests that lay behind the relationship.
In the Belly of the Green Bird
By Nir Rosen
Free Press, 2006
This classic work of journalism, one of the few to go beyond coverage within the American-controlled Green Zone, examines the disastrous aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
