Book Talk with Marc Lynch, Author of "America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region"
Registration
This program is free and lunch will be served. To reserve your lunch, please register by Monday, January 19 at noon.
Book Description
After Hamas' shocking 2023 attack on Israel, the United States stood firmly behind Israel's near-genocidal war on Gaza, despite widespread moral outrage and significant damage to Washington's global agenda. But Gaza is only the latest paradox in thirty-five years of Middle East policy. How did this pattern develop, why can't policymakers learn from repeated Middle Eastern calamities, and what does Gaza's destruction mean for America's place in the world?
Marc Lynch charts the United States' disastrously failed approach to the post-Cold War Middle East, where aspirations for US leadership and a calm region have only produced war, instability and humanitarian catastrophe. Lynch exposes the failure of each president's efforts to transform the Middle East in America's image, or pivot away from the region; Washington's refusal to take seriously the views of Middle Easterners; and its fantasy of forging a regional order 'without' the Palestinian issue.
Moving between American politics and Middle Eastern realities, this incisive account explains why US policy has not changed despite its horrifying human costs, from Iraq, Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen and Libya.
Speaker & Author
Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS). He received his B.A. in Political Science from Duke University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics and international relations. A former Visiting Scholar at the Mershon Center, he is a contributing editor for The Washington Post's Monkey Cage political science page, editor of the Columbia University Press series Columbia Studies on Middle East Politics, and a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.