In the 1970s, after the Six-Day War had time to sink in, an impressive number of Western academics, journalists, politicians, diplomats, spooks, and especially oil executives gave Israel a centripetal eminence in the Middle East that neither its population, geography, faith, wealth, nor even military accomplishments merited. Thirteen hundred years of Islamic history over 3.8 million square miles started getting boiled down to onerous and acrimonious conversations about the contemporary bloody wrestling matches between Jews and Arabs on less than 11,000 square miles of the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Modern Middle Eastern studies, where certainly the most passionate if not the most accomplished students gravitated, became battlefields where anti-Zionist sentiments usually proved triumphant.
This Arabist critique—that Israel was the fulcrum of Middle Eastern instability—was actually the lingua franca in the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and oil companies long before the Palestinians became a cause célèbre. It centered overwhelmingly on the math: one poor, socialist Jewish state versus an ever-increasing number of Arab countries, many of which had vast amounts of untapped oil and ruling elites with enormous appetites. This view also had a personal aspect: Often mannerless, ill-clad Ashkenazi Israelis (Eastern European socialists weren’t known for their etiquette or fashion) didn’t appeal to America’s WASPy officials and oil execs who served overseas. Arabs were warmer, more hospitable, and urbane.
But this mindset started to weaken (outside of universities) in the 1980s as Middle Eastern issues tangential to the Israeli-Arab controversy took center stage. Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade the Islamic Republic in 1980 had absolutely nothing to do with the troubles in the Holy Land. The resulting Iran-Iraq war defined that decade in the Middle East and set the stage for the great Sunni-Shiite tug of war, which has since drawn battle lines across the region.
And from the 1980s to 9/11 an increasing number of Western observers began to realize that the growth of Islamic militancy, from Morocco to Indonesia, had little to nothing to do with the battle between Jews and Muslims. As Muslims tried to digest a Western-born modernity, as increasingly savage secular dictatorships arose, especially among the Arabs, and Westernized Middle Eastern princes led exuberantly hypocritical, corrupt lives, Islamic radicalism gained ground. Westerners—especially among the cosmopolitan set who run foreign and intelligence ministries—have always had great difficulty appreciating the role of religion in earthly affairs. Islam is particularly problematic since the allure seems, for many Westerners, retrograde. But after 9/11, after the Europeans also started getting attacked, most folks understood more clearly than before that Israel wasn’t a culprit for this animus. Hatred of Zion is a common denominator of Islamists; it’s not even in most places a tertiary cause for Islamic extremism.
In the United States, by the time of Barack Obama’s presidency, which on its face cared deeply about the Israeli–Palestinian imbroglio, the Arabist gravamen against America—that Washington cocked things up because of the original sin of recognizing Israel in 1948—had become uncommon. The anti-Semitic set of the old Washington establishment might surface the view after a few drinks—questions about dual-loyalty and the pervasive influence of Jews on American culture naturally bleeds into a coked-up view of Israel’s perversity. But such eruptions seemed like a daguerreotype of a lost age.
Members of the Washington foreign-policy establishment may have still wanted to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem through a two-state solution, but they didn’t do so because U.S.–Israeli ties impeded the United States in the Middle East. Just hotel hopping in the Gulf states would have quickly disabused even the most obtuse observer that Israel was an impediment to Americans making money or having military bases where Washington wanted them. Israeli officials, who once would have walked on hot coals just to say “Hi!” to a second-rate Arab official, became quite discriminating in assessing Arabs worth their time. Obama, Joe Biden, and their minions focused more on Israel’s moral state (can its democracy survive occupation) and the internal Palestinian mess—the fight between Palestinian Islamists and the more secular and hapless crowd in the Palestinian Authority. Israel-Palestine had become a cause, not a perplexing part of a grand strategy.
This is why Daniel E. Zoughbie’s book, Kicking The Hornet’s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East from Truman to Trump, is so odd: Zoughbie didn’t get the memo. I confess: I often find revisionists fun. Washington books—especially those pumped out by traditional think tanks—are usually dull because they regurgitate conventional wisdom in prose that would be at home in State Department telegrams. Zoughbie seems novel: He has actually managed to write a thoroughly revisionist work by extolling the past’s conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy read. This would be bad enough if this were a work of history; it’s just deadly in a 411-page polemic. Polemics need to be a bit vivacious to be effective. And the book’s many digressions shouldn’t lead the reader to think the author is writing a kitchen-sink polemic where pet peeves need to be vented.
Zoughbie has a lot of peeves. He is probably most annoyed when he is discussing Harry Truman, since he recognized Israel and set America down its calamitous path. That really shouldn’t have led Zoughbie, however, into a disapproving disquisition on Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But his apples-and-oranges animadversions are linked: The “expert” opinion Truman should have listened to that would have dissuaded him from using the bomb—or at least using the bomb twice—was the same kind of expert opinion that would have kept him from recognizing Israel, or at least not recognizing Israel without recognizing a Palestinian state (Zoughbie doesn’t bother to explain how those Palestinian Arabs would have coalesced with the Hashemites controlling East Jerusalem and the West Bank). As Zoughbie puts it:
This is all to demonstrate that in matters of war and peace, Truman was regarded as honest, decisive, and commonsensical, despite his lack of advanced education and executive experience. Yet these same qualities could also be viewed as his greatest weaknesses. He was honest—insofar as it advanced his political ambitions and public image. He was decisive—often in situations where humility and complex analysis were required. He embraced common sense—when uncommon thinking and nuanced guidance from experts were needed.
Truman regarded Ivy Leaguers and other highly educated and experienced individuals like Oppenheimer and Marshall with antipathy. It was a major character flaw. The evidence that this antipathy contributed to his failed Middle East policy is abundantly clear.
Zoughbie has a pronounced predilection for highly educated people, especially when they think like him. And sourcing of the well-educated in his writing isn’t a small problem: It’s often not clear where Zoughbie’s opinion begins and ends when he’s using commentary that appears to derive from others. (There are no footnotes in the book; notes at the back are sometimes hard to align with the text.) Zoughbie apparently used a lot of interviews though it isn’t clear, given the structure of the work and how far in the past he goes, why he did so except to elevate his own cachet with the reader. In one of the most self-centered, name-dropping prologues I’ve ever encountered, Zoughbie explains his modus operandi:
The main lesson I learned from Lord Weidenfeld was the importance of networking, an art he had mastered. Throughout my research, I tried at every opportunity to supplement my understanding of the view from below with an understanding of how and why global figures make the decisions they do. I cast the net wide and sought out all sorts of people. For example, I was once at a birthday party for Lord Weidenfeld hosted at famed architect Lord (Norman) Foster’s château in Switzerland. In attendance was legendary journalist Barbara Walters, the Begum Aga Khan, Princess Firyal of Jordan, Lord Rothschild, and, one of my dinner partners, former British deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine. After Walters gave the toast, everyone played musical chairs and switched dinner partners. I wound up sitting next to an Israeli ambassador’s wife. And seated across from me was James Wolfensohn, a former president of the World Bank and, more importantly for my interests, the former U.S. envoy to Gaza.
With the possible exceptions of Maureen Dowd and Peter Beinart, who writes like this?
Thematically, Zoughbie uses each presidency since Truman’s to argue that America’s original sin in the Middle East, recognizing Israel, gets bigger and bigger as U.S. support for the Jewish state increases. This chain reaction sets in motion American vs. Arab, Arab vs. Israeli, and Arab vs. Arab mayhem, not to mention Islamic militancy and nuclear proliferation. (Zoughbie seems utterly unaware that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear aspirations started because of Saddam Hussein’s invasion; America, not Israel, is the enemy that the clerical regime has wanted to check through its nuclear-weapons program. The 12-Day War may have, possibly, changed that calculation.)
At times, Zoughbie echoes the old missionary American Arabist: The United States is good when it founds universities and backs development programs. But he isn’t enamored of America as an avatar of human rights in the Middle East. Zoughbie seems to actually believe George W. Bush went to war in Iraq to spread democracy, which just goes to show that the author’s dinner companions didn’t extend into the Bush administration.
Zoughbie tries in his recounting of America’s many mistakes to draw an alternate history of “if only.” This doesn’t intellectually gel since a cardinal feature of this book is that the author doesn’t spend much time trying to limn pictures of Middle Eastern peoples. Who the Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis, Iranians, Saudis, Jordanians, Afghans, etc., actually are—how their cultural-religious identity forms over time in their interactions with each other and with foreigners—almost never surfaces. To a sometimes shocking extent, he robs the natives of their agency, making them far too often victims of American or Israeli transgressions. And Zoughbie clearly has no idea of how to handle Islam. He has a clear preference for secular nationalists, and secular nationalist dictators, and a tendency to find nonreligious motivations among Islamists who tell you rather ardently how important the divine is in their mission. Being dumb about Islam isn’t a big black mark in Washington, but such a deficiency is a bit disappointing in a book that castigates Washington’s actions in the heart of the Muslim world.
With the occasional exception of Israelis and Palestinians that he loathes and admires (he sees the late Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian activist and politician, as a missed savior of the Palestinian people), Zoughbie gives us a Middle East without Middle Easterners in starring roles. He is painfully America-centric, which, perhaps in part, springs from the author’s reliance on English sources. He could have tried a lot harder to broaden the range of the secondary sources that he piggy-backs on to construct his takedown of America and its most unreliable, most overrated, most two-timing, Janus-faced “ally,” Israel. There are interesting books out there that can be rather snarky about America in the Middle East and Zion. This isn’t one of them.
Nonetheless, every reviewer should give the author the last word since even writing a bad book is a lot of work. And after 325 pages on America’s blunders, which still might plunge the region into a nuclear winter, Zoughbie offers his counsel on the ways to make a real difference. Among his recommendations are:
Strategic trade arteries, notably the Suez and the Gulf of Aden, should be secured and new ones created.
A transition plan should be developed for the region as the global economy phases out fossil fuels.
An emergency plan for diabetes, obesity, and heart disease should be funded by GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, along the lines of what was done for HIV/AIDS in Africa.
QED.
Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East from Truman to Trump.
by Daniel E. Zoughbie
Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., $32
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
