In March 2023, China’s announcement that it had brokered renewed diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran threw into sharp relief the United States’ rapidly diminishing role in the Middle East. Shortly after President Joe Biden came to office, the United States completed its inept withdrawal from Afghanistan, a country that Washington had spent 20 years trying and failing to bring into the Western fold. Then the president, who as a candidate had cast Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” because of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s alleged involvement in the murder of the regime critic Jamal Khashoggi, soon found the Saudis rebuffing a U.S. request to increase oil production during the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. diplomatic efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal faltered amid a violent wave of repression by the Iranian regime. And the administration looked on helplessly as the most far-right government in Israeli history came to power, threatening the country’s claims to democracy, fueling a new wave of violence, and jeopardizing the Washington-backed Abraham Accords.
Observers may be forgiven for wondering whether U.S. influence in the region has declined permanently. Or for that matter, whether the Biden administration even cares, amid the war in Ukraine and the growing U.S. rivalry with Russia and China. Although former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump paid lip service to a “pivot” away from the Middle East, they both engaged in multiple military deployments and large-scale diplomatic initiatives, from promoting democracy during the Arab uprisings to engineering peace deals between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. Today, despite the region’s far-reaching challenges—including the ravages of civil war in Libya, Syria, and Yemen; economic decay in Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia; the growing threats of climate change, inequality, and region-wide instability; and resurgent authoritarianism everywhere—very little of that ambitious U.S. agenda remains.
In Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, the former National Security Council member and veteran Middle East expert Steven Simon attempts to explain how this collapse happened. Tracing U.S. efforts to shape the region from the Iranian revolution in 1979 to Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in Israel in December 2022, Simon draws stark lessons: Washington’s Middle East strategy has been, as his title suggests, “delusional,” fabricated in the continual “superimposition of grand ideas” by policymakers convinced of their own virtuous intentions toward a region about which they knew little and cared less. As he writes, “It is a tale of gross misunderstandings, appalling errors, and death and destruction on an epochal scale.” These conclusions are true, although perhaps not quite sufficient. A more urgent question today is how—or even whether—Washington can learn from these catastrophic blunders to craft a more constructive approach in an era of waning U.S. influence.
EIGHT KINDS OF FAILURE
In offering a comprehensive, even magisterial review of U.S. policy in the Middle East over the past half century, Grand Delusion aspires to convey “the worldview of the author as witness and as historian.” Simon certainly has the credentials to do this, having been directly involved in many of the policies and strategies he writes about here. He worked in the U.S. State Department during the Reagan and first Bush administrations and served in senior National Security Council positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Between his stints in government, he has held senior positions at several think tanks and universities and written widely noted books on terrorism and the Middle East.
Yet Simon finds little reason to applaud the policies he helped shape. In fact, he now believes that, during his decades in Washington, U.S. efforts in the Middle East have often been a fool’s errand. More often than not, ambitious plans to secure stability, promote democracy, and thwart terrorism resulted instead in strengthening autocracy, aggravating economic misery, and inciting violence. “The delusion,” he writes, “was rooted in the conviction that facts don’t matter, just intentions; that we create and inhabit our own reality, our capacities are unconfined, and the objects of our policy have no agency.” This is strong stuff, but Simon does not flinch. As he observes, the fact that U.S. policymakers, himself included, wanted to make the Middle East a better place while advancing Washington’s strategic interests is not “exculpatory” but rather the heart of the problem.
Grand Delusion tells the story of eight successive U.S. presidential administrations, which gives the narrative a chronological clarity even if it obscures broader historical trends. The book begins with President Jimmy Carter’s negotiation of the Camp David accords, the historic 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. According to Simon, U.S. involvement in the Middle East up to that point had been relatively modest. For the most part, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson “steered clear” of the region, leaving military intervention to the British. After Camp David, that decisively changed. “It is really after 1979 that we see America militarizing its Middle East policy,” he writes.
The consequences of this shift, in Simon’s view, can be seen in everything from the Reagan administration’s botched intervention in the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s to Obama’s self-described “shit show” in Libya, the disorderly U.S.-led NATO campaign that followed the 2011 uprising against the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. Moving quickly past the Camp David accords, Simon devotes many pages to Carter’s hapless Iran policy, which ended with the disastrous effort to rescue American hostages in Tehran. In his estimation, this unforced error contributed to Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential contest and dramatically amplified the role of Middle East policy in American electoral politics. In his chapter on Reagan, Simon reviews the president’s responses to terrorism, Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the Iran-contra scandal, concluding that “there was nothing the administration attempted in the Middle East in its two terms that left the United States better off.”
During President George H. W. Bush’s momentous single term in office, the United States drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and then, at the 1991 Madrid Conference, helped usher in several decades of negotiations between the Israelis, the Palestinians, and, occasionally, other Arab states. Yet in Simon’s view, the administration accomplished not much else. Indeed, as he sees it, the victory in the Gulf War and the launch of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were little more than “twin illusions” that Bush bequeathed to Bill Clinton. Under the Clinton administration, the Oslo accords, a pair of agreements signed in 1993 and 1995, produced the mutual recognition of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. But no real progress was made on constructing a Palestinian state, and Clinton’s second-term efforts to secure a genuine peace agreement came to naught. In the end, after several years of hope, Clinton’s bequest to President George W. Bush was little better than what he himself had received.
In Simon’s telling, the September 11, 2001, attacks by al Qaeda on the United States brought the militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East to a climax. As astonishing as the assaults themselves were, the failure of the White House to see them coming dumbfounds Simon: “It later seemed incredible that the Bush administration could be so heedless of the intelligence warning of an imminent attack.” Moreover, in the aftermath, the Bush team twisted the nature of the jihadist threat, using 9/11 to justify a Captain Ahab–like quest for revenge overseen by neoconservative and hawkish officials recycled from the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Rather than al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, the principal target soon became Saddam Hussein despite counterterrorism officials’ conclusion that the Iraqi dictator had no meaningful links to the terrorist group.
The result was the invasion and occupation of Iraq, in which an even more radically anti-American terrorist group—the Islamic State, also known as ISIS—was incubated. Amid this costly conflict and the parallel one unfolding in Afghanistan, little progress was made in securing U.S. interests or making the Middle East better off. Simon’s verdict on these years is devastating. Acting in the belief that the United States was “the greatest power on earth,” the Bush administration “lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and killed, or caused to die, hundreds of thousands of people.”
The Obama administration came into office wanting to quit these troubled waters, only to find itself dragged back in by the rise of ISIS, which foiled the president’s efforts to withdraw from Iraq, and by the unexpected Arab uprisings of 2010–11. In the wake of Obama’s well-received 2009 speech in Cairo promising a new beginning in U.S. policy in the region, the administration’s equivocating responses to the popular revolts against U.S.-allied regimes left democrats and autocrats alike feeling betrayed. For Simon, it is a bitter irony that Obama’s single significant strategic accomplishment, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was almost immediately repudiated by Trump. His administration instead embarked on a vengeful but ineffective pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic while embracing autocratic regimes on which Washington had long if anxiously relied, including President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s Egypt and, especially, the Saudi government being reshaped by Prince Mohammed. The administration also dropped the pretense of American support for the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian peace process, choosing instead to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and to engineer the Abraham Accords. That agreement brought together Israel and, eventually, four Arab states—Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates—that seemed to share Israel’s concerns about Iran, were eager for Israeli business, and no longer even feigned much interest in the fate of the Palestinians.
In taking these steps, Simon argues that Trump’s transactional deal-making exacerbated the chaotic nature of U.S. Middle East policy, which had vacillated between pieties about democracy promotion and realist visions of strategic dominance. “On the whole,” he tells us, “Trump’s Middle East looked worse than Obama’s four years earlier.” Trump did much to accelerate the erosion of U.S. influence, sharing with Obama what Simon calls “a declining sense of the utility, purpose, and effectiveness of American engagement, and especially of military intervention, in the Middle East.” By the time Biden reached office in 2021, U.S. strategy was self-defeating, and neither friends nor foes among the region’s leading states had much regard for the United States or its policy.
OUR OWN WORST ENEMIES
Given the extraordinary scale of American involvement in the Middle East over the past four and a half decades, why have U.S. policies been so consistently ham-fisted? Simon offers several answers. First and most colorful is his assessment of the people responsible for creating them. Carter’s inner circle was “dysfunctional.” The Reagan administration was peopled by “thin-skinned, devious, recalcitrant antagonists” whose vision of an Arab-Israeli peace process was “nearly perfectly silly.” George H. W. Bush’s team was “blinded” by “the glare of U.S. power and comforts of wishful thinking.” Clinton’s Middle East advisers were “hobbled by an attraction to faulty doctrines.” George W. Bush was “demonstrably narrow-minded, incurious, and impulsive,” with a “crude approach to foreign policy dilemmas.” Obama’s trouble in Libya reflected no malign intent, only “incompetence.” And then there was Trump, who assigned the Middle East portfolio to his son-in-law Jared Kushner in pursuit of “self-dealing crony capitalism.” After reading this catalog, it is hard to resist the conclusion that U.S. tax dollars have been paying the salaries of an astonishing collection of rascals and reprobates.
Equally important for Simon is a deeply flawed policy process. Rather than common sense or strategic insight, U.S. policymaking in the region has invariably been shaped by “political imperatives, ideological fixations, emotional impulses, and a coordination process that necessitates some sort of interagency consensus on the part of cabinet members whose priorities are often incompatible.” Even the most gifted analysts, he suggests, would have trouble getting good ideas implemented. Simon cannot resist (and who can blame him) reminding readers that more than 18 months before the 9/11 attacks, he and the counterterrorism expert Daniel Benjamin published an article in The New York Times warning that there would soon be “a mass casualty attack against the United States by Sunni extremists.” So much for operational understanding and early warning.
Yet there are other explanations for the United States’ Middle East failures that Simon neglects. By organizing Grand Delusion around successive administrations, he is compelled to foreground the political cycles that shape short-term policy choices rather than focus on broader national inclinations and global developments. As the Cold War ended, American triumphalism inhibited the sort of soul-searching in Washington that might have produced more serious deliberation about the consequences of U.S. policies and what, exactly, U.S. interests in the Middle East should be. For example, Simon points out that when Washington began its plunge into the region in the 1970s, “the vulnerability of Saudi Arabia and Israel appeared striking.” But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, under the tutelage and extravagant backing of the United States, both countries had grown into regional powerhouses that were increasingly ready to challenge Washington when their interests diverged. Although such nurturing of vulnerable countries into powerful players (and frequent irritants) counts as success according to Simon, he also asks, “At what cost?” That is a crucial consideration: the United States and the region have both paid a high price for U.S. patronage of Israel and Saudi Arabia. But this largely unquestioning support also raises the question of whether the security of Israel and assured access to Gulf oil—which were hardly adequate measures of U.S. interests in the Middle East 50 years ago—should continue to shape Washington’s policies toward the region today.
Simon’s emphasis on bilateral relations with allies and adversaries is also revealing for what it leaves out. In an era in which digital innovation has transformed media, expanded supply chains, enriched the finance industry, reshaped military technology, revolutionized espionage and autocracy, and generated growing inequality, the role and interests of the world’s most powerful country have necessarily changed as well. Yet he does not discuss the kinds of social, economic, and technological forces—from Internet penetration and literacy rates to population growth and youth unemployment—that have long shaped daily lives in the Middle East. The omission of these issues seems hard to justify, particularly since many of the drivers of change have been technologies developed in and associated with the United States.
Simon complains that intelligence analysts are good at exposing weaknesses in policy proposals “but never offer any ideas about how to make them better.” Grand Delusion suffers from some of the same limitations. Would smarter, more honest, clear-eyed policymakers, unencumbered by hubris or bureaucratic pettiness, make better policy? Although Simon discusses roads not taken that might have led to better outcomes at specific points in his story, tactical agility is not strategic insight, and he does not put forward a vision of a more effective U.S. strategy toward the region.
LISTEN OR LOSE
Washington has long defined the Middle East in the negative, by what should be prevented rather than what should be promoted. Thus did policymakers jockey to contain Soviet influence during the Cold War and to maneuver Iraq and Iran into blocking each other in Clinton’s post–Cold War “dual containment” strategy. Successive administrations have devoted enormous resources to deterring rogue states, foiling terrorists, preventing nuclear proliferation, searching for weapons of mass destruction, controlling refugee flows, and otherwise searching out and averting myriad perceived dangers in the region. But prevention does not amount to engagement, however expensive and time-consuming it has been. Sporadic efforts to involve the region’s people have faltered in the face of electoral victories and negotiations that produced leaders who did not reflect U.S. policy preferences. These sometimes unsettling reflections of local political aspirations—such as the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2007 or of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt in 2012 or, for that matter, a right-wing Israeli government in 2022—quickly became yet further rationales for policies of prevention and containment.
What, apart from Biden’s tired gestures toward the now hollow rhetoric of “cooperation, stability, security, and prosperity,” does the United States want to promote in the Middle East? George W. Bush went to war in Iraq to advance “liberty”; Obama intervened in Libya to secure “human rights.” Trump simply wanted to midwife a few lucrative deals in a region he called “one big, fat quagmire.” At this point, merely lowering the volume of declarations from Washington would be a welcome change. Indeed, it might prompt U.S. policymakers to listen to voices in the region, particularly if American diplomats are pushed out of their fortified embassies to walk among the people to whose governments they are accredited. Behind the megaprojects touted by those governments and the glittering trade fairs showcasing the latest and most expensive new technologies in weapons and cybersecurity, they might notice the vibrant tech-startup scene that is struggling to emerge in Egypt’s informal economy and use U.S. influence to urge reform of the regulatory environment for small business. They might read the public opinion polls in Libya that blame the continuing violence on foreign interference and advise Washington to enforce the country’s universally flouted arms embargo. They might see the deteriorating utilities infrastructure in Lebanon and push for international efforts to rebuild the electric grid. They might resist the temptation to see everything through the lens of security threats, devoting their energy to sniffing out any country’s pursuit of technologies that might conceivably be “dual use”—turned into weapons—and working to frustrate them. There is enough frustration in the Middle East.
Until the United States defines its interests in the region, it will remain in a limbo of disillusioned involvement, reduced to trying—and increasingly failing, as China’s recent diplomatic triumph suggests—to thwart others. Even as Washington shows a growing reluctance to engage, it will remain unable to disengage. Simply “taking out” local military leaders in occasional military strikes is guaranteed only to produce more disaffected and embittered people who see no alternative to violence to make themselves heard. From that perspective, perhaps Simon’s final assessment, offered in a spirit of resignation, is actually an occasion for hope: “Whatever the future holds for the United States in the Middle East, it will scarcely resemble either the past or the present.”
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