America's Middle East: How Washington brought ruin to the region

“America's Middle East: How Washington brought ruin to the region Submitted by Hossam el-Hamalawy on Thu, 05/21/2026 - 12:16 Marc Lynch's new book says US foreign policy did not fail but was designed to keep the Middle East broken A Kuwaiti woman welcomes a US soldier with rose water on 27 February 1991 after allied forces rolled into Kuwait City (Christophe Simon/AFP) Off America’s Middle East by Marc Lynch is a book written against amnesia, and against the greasy consolations by which empires survive their crimes. It is also, improbably, a magnificent act of civic faith. Lynch begins in rage, but he does not remain there. The anger that animates these pages is not the ornamental fury of the columnist or the safely retrospective indignation of the memoirist. It is the rage of someone who has lived inside the institutions through which American Middle East policy is made, and who has finally concluded that the machine did not merely malfunction. It worked as designed. Lynch is unusually well placed to make the case. A professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School , he is one of the most important American interpreters of Arab politics of recent decades. He has written on the Arab public sphere, the 2011 uprisings and the new wars that followed. Lynch is not a parachutist, nor a late convert discovering Palestine after scrolling through horrors on a phone. His work has long moved between scholarship and policy, between the public hopes of the region and the bureaucratic habits of the power that has so often crushed them. That double vision gives the book its force. Lynch knows the American policy world too intimately to caricature it, and the Middle East too seriously to forgive it. Establishing a brutal order The argument is sweeping and patient. Since 1991, the United States has not merely entered the region. It has constituted a regional order: America’s Middle East. That order rests on military primacy, protection of Israel , the arming and preservation of autocratic allies, containment of Iran, the policing of permissible politics, and the routine conversion of Arab and Muslim suffering into strategic background noise. It promised peace, democracy, development and stability. It produced Iraq’s ruin, a frozen and fraudulent peace process in Palestine, the survival of regimes that tortured, Libya’s collapse, Syria’s inferno, Yemen’s starvation, Sudan’s abandonment and genocide in Gaza. Lynch describes a foreign policy without a consistent moral underpinning (Hurst) Palestine is the book’s moral centre, even when Lynch widens the lens beyond it. His argument is not simply that Washington failed to broker a just settlement, but that the so-called peace process became one of the central institutions of American regional domination. It converted occupation into process, dispossession into negotiation, and Palestinian political existence into a security problem to be managed. The Oslo accords appear here not as a lost opportunity tragically squandered, but as a structure that allowed Israel to deepen control while the United States preserved the fiction of mediation. Gaza, in this reading, is not an aberration. It is the endpoint of a system that treated Palestinian life as administratively inconvenient and Palestinian resistance as proof of unfitness for freedom. Lynch is especially sharp on the way American policy makes Palestinian suffering visible only when it threatens regional order, never when it demands justice. The book is careful not to absolve regional rulers. Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, Israeli, Iranian, Syrian and other actors appear here as agents with projects, cruelties and calculations of their own. But Lynch rejects the alibi of local agency when it becomes a way of laundering American responsibility. Washington did not invent every despot, militia or war. It did, however, build the weather in which they learned to move. It rewarded brutality, sanctioned others, excused allies, demonised enemies, disciplined knowledge and then called the resulting wasteland order. Different leadership, same destructive mindset There is a grim comedy in the continuity Lynch describes. Presidents arrive promising to pivot, rebalance, end forever wars or make a new beginning. They leave having reproduced the same architecture. George HW Bush launches the order from the wreckage of Iraq. Bill Clinton sanctifies it through sanctions and Oslo’s theatrical promise. George W Bush breaks it by invading Iraq, while claiming to democratise the region by force. Barack Obama sees more clearly than most, tries at moments to reduce the American footprint, reaches for the Iran nuclear deal, then is pulled back by inherited compulsions. Donald Trump strips the system of liberal pretence, embraces transactional cruelty and normalisation without Palestine. Joe Biden, the institutionalist, brings the edifice to its moral nadir by arming and shielding Israel as Gaza is pulverised. Nuanced approaches Lynch’s treatment of Islamism is one of the book’s quieter strengths. He refuses the lazy American habit of treating Islamists as a single civilisational threat, forever outside politics, history and social life. Islamism in these pages is neither romanticised nor flattened. Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Islamist actors are placed inside specific political orders, wars, occupations, state collapses and fields of repression. Hyper-Zionism: How Israel became Germany's 'reason' for being Read More » Lynch understands that movements formed under occupation, dictatorship or foreign assault cannot be explained by theology alone. At the same time, he does not turn them into noble vessels of resistance. They have their own hierarchies, coercions, sectarian languages and strategic brutalities. What matters is that the American order has repeatedly helped produce the very Islamist forces it later claims to be fighting, whether by closing non-violent political routes, backing dictators who crush elected Islamists, tolerating occupation, or reducing whole societies to security laboratories. Anti-Islamism becomes, in Washington and among its Arab allies, a grammar of rule. It justifies prisons, coups, surveillance, bombing and the permanent suspicion of popular politics. Designed to fail The most disturbing claim in the book is not that American policy failed. Failure would be a softer word, suggesting error, miscalculation, tragedy. Lynch’s harsher point is that many of these policies succeeded according to their own metrics. Israel remained armed and protected. Oil moved. Autocrats stayed friendly. Iran was contained or punished. American centrality was reaffirmed in every crisis, even when that centrality made resolution impossible. The scandal is not only that Arabs and Muslims are dehumanised. It is that this dehumanisation has been institutionalised by people who often believe themselves humane The dead were not counted in the ledger that mattered. Here the prose gathers a cold brightness. Lynch does not need to shout. The sentences have the terrible calm of an autopsy. Lynch’s book is also an anatomy of racism, though he approaches the word through political history rather than sermon. Again and again, American policy presumes that Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Lebanese , Syrians and Sudanese can be bombed, sanctioned, displaced, starved or managed without producing the same moral emergency that would follow the death of Americans or Israelis. The hierarchy is not always spoken. It does not need to be. It is embedded in casualty debates, in television language, in congressional reflex, in the anthropology of think-tank panels, in the ease with which “security” devours populations. The scandal is not only that Arabs and Muslims are dehumanised. It is that this dehumanisation has been institutionalised by people who often believe themselves humane. 'Hypocrisy as infrastructure' The title is therefore exact. America’s Middle East is not the Middle East as lived by its peoples, nor the Middle East of its poets, prisoners, workers, exiles, mothers, revolutionaries and martyrs. It is a geopolitical construction, a map drawn by power and defended by euphemism. Lynch’s achievement is to show how that map became so durable, and why even its failures have rarely discredited it inside Washington. Bad outcomes become arguments for more management. Blowback becomes proof of local pathology. Popular anger becomes manipulation. Democracy is praised until it threatens America’s friends. International law is invoked against enemies and suspended for allies. The result is not hypocrisy as an occasional lapse, but hypocrisy as infrastructure. For readers of the region, much of this will feel painfully familiar. Arabs have known for decades that America’s liberal language becomes brittle at the first mention of Palestine Arabs have known for decades that America’s liberal language becomes brittle at the first mention of Palestine, that promotion of democracy stops at the palace gate, that human rights are negotiable when arms contracts and bases are in view. But Lynch’s book is valuable precisely because it is written from within the American sphere, by someone who has heard its arguments in their most intelligent form. He is not content to denounce. He explains how policies become natural, how dissent becomes marginal, how institutions teach decent people to defend indecent outcomes. The timing gives the book its urgency. We are living not after catastrophe, but inside it. Gaza is not over. The Gulf is not an island of stability but a nervous theatre of rapprochements, rivalries, investments and wars deferred. The Most American King: Jordan’s Abdullah II and the craft of survival Read More » Yemen’s war has mutated rather than ended. Sudan burns at the edge of the world’s conscience. Syria’s ruins keep shifting. Iran and Israel move between shadow war and open exchange. The Red Sea, oil routes and the university campus are now part of the same trembling system. The instability shaking the world is not an interruption of the old order. It is the old order revealing itself. That is why America’s Middle East should be read now. Not because it offers the comfort of policy recommendations, though it implies many. Nor because it relieves regional actors of blame, because it does not. It should be read because it restores proportion. It asks the question that polite debate avoids: what if the structure that claims to prevent chaos is one of chaos’s principal authors? What if the ruin is not accidental, but cumulative? What if moral clarity begins by admitting that those under the bombs have always understood the system better than those who dropped them? Lynch has written a brilliant, necessary and sorrowing book. Its celebration lies not in cheerfulness, but in its refusal of despair. To describe a prison is also to insist that its walls were made, and can be unmade. America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region, by Marc Lynch, is available to order through Hurst . 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