Book Club - The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present And Future in the Middle East by Steven Cook

Note: Registration opens one month in advance.

ABSTRACT

A clear-headed vision for the United States' role in the Middle East that highlights the changing nature of US national interests and the challenges of grand strategizing at a time of profound change in the international order.

Following a long series of catastrophic misadventures in the Middle East over the last two decades, the American foreign policy community has tried to understand what went wrong. After weighing the evidence, they have mostly advised a retreat from the region. The basic view is that when the United States tries to advance change in the Middle East, it only makes matters worse. 

In The End of Ambition, Steven A. Cook argues that while these analysts are rightly concerned that engagement drains US resources and distorts its domestic politics, the broader impulse to disengage tends to neglect important lessons from the past. Moreover, advocates of pulling back overlook the potential risks of withdrawal. Covering the relationship between the US and the Middle East since the end of WWII, Cook makes the bold claim that despite setbacks and moral costs, the United States has been overwhelmingly successful in protecting its core national interests in the Middle East. Conversely, overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage US power not only ended in failure, but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways. 

About the Author

Steven Cook is a senior fellow in Middle East and Africa Studies  and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy; and an award winning author of three books on the Middle East.  He was previously a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.  He holds a BA in international studies from Vassar College, an MA in International relations from John Hopkin's University, and an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks Arabic and Turkish.