The implosion of Obama’s vision—and his replication of Cold War–era American policies that ran roughshod over human rights in the Middle East—serves as a sharp illustration of the dynamic that Fawaz A. Gerges outlines in his new book, What Really Went Wrong. The title is a sly allusion to a work by the late historian Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Lewis’s slim volume became a surprise international bestseller, selling in huge numbers not just in the U.S. but in places like Denmark and Italy. In Lewis’s view, radicalized Muslims attacked America because they wrongly blamed us for the failings of the Islamic civilization to adapt to the modern world. Its author advised the Bush administration about the benefits certain to accrue if the United States invaded Iraq, permanently tarnishing his reputation.
Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, tells a very different story. In his account, the sources of anger at the United States in Muslim-majority countries, and the woeful situation in Arab lands, stem from postwar American foreign policy—particularly that of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, which lasted from 1953 to 1961. During those tense, youthful Cold War years, Ike made fateful decisions to defy the wishes of the bulk of the population in Iran and Egypt, rejecting their governments and marginalizing their leaders. At a time when much of the region was asserting independence from colonial rule, the U.S. decisively intervened in these two critical countries in the name of anti-Communist paranoia, to the detriment of their long-term economic and democratic development. “America’s post–World War II imperial ambitions and its offensive conduct in the early decades of the global Cold War trigged something resembling a geostrategic curse in the Middle East,” Gerges writes.
In 2024, the U.S. faces some of the same challenges in the Middle East that it did in 1954: Our allies are repressive and unpopular with their own people, while hostile leaders benefit by antagonizing the United States. As a guide to some of the worst policymaking of the Cold War, Gerges’s book is instructive, though far from groundbreaking. As a jumping off point for better U.S. policy in the future, however, it is sometimes perplexing, often missing a sense of the range of factors that shaped policy on the ground and proffering unsound solutions. In order to think about resetting American policy in this region, we need to clearly understand the dangers of aligning ourselves with autocrats—even ones that are anti-colonial and popular.