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
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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