A stimulating, well-researched examination of how postwar U.S. presidential decisions destabilized the Middle East.
Tracing seven decades of U.S. presidential missteps in Middle Eastern diplomacy.
Noted Middle Eastern studies scholar and author of Indecision Points: George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2014), Zoughbie presents an engrossing account of how the blunders, indecisiveness, and exalted hubris of 12 presidents from Truman through Trump’s first term have transformed the Middle East into a destabilizing force. Zoughbie argues that “as the United States replaced the Ottoman Empire, France, and Britain as the region's hegemon, it failed to act prudently, moving away from soft power toward an overreliance on hard power. Rather than prioritizing development and diplomacy—and diplomacy through development—U.S. foreign policy opted time and again for defensive military spending: coups, wars, and arms deals.” Through detailed case studies of each president, Zoughbie traces steady deterioration, from Truman’s shortsightedness—“By recognizing only Jewish and not Arab self-determination, with neither a bridge nor a partition plan, Truman virtually guaranteed the immediacy of a regional war”—to Kennedy's inability to curtail Israel’s weapon development, to Reagan’s presidency “characterized by alleged lawlessness, shady deals, and quid pro quos involving hostages,” with this pattern continuing through subsequent administrations. Somewhat surprisingly, only unelected Gerald Ford emerges favorably; Zoughbie praises his Mideast policy as “a magnificent achievement of modern statecraft,” noting that Ford demanded that Israel negotiate in good faith with Egypt and was willing to challenge the American-Israeli alliance to achieve peace. While Zoughbie in his prologue references recent events like the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, his analysis concentrates on the historical decisions that created today’s crisis. Acknowledging that regional problems stem from multiple sources—wealthy Persian Gulf nations prioritized modernization while poor countries descended into conflict, and leaders missed opportunities to improve their people’s lives—he concludes that decades of misguided American interventions significantly worsened conditions by fueling distrust, undermining stability, and perpetuating cycles of violence throughout the region.
A stimulating, well-researched examination of how postwar U.S. presidential decisions destabilized the Middle East.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781668085226
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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