By Joel Magalnick, Editor, The Jewish Sound
Interested in knowing more about why there’s a war against Hamas in Gaza? Where ISIS came from and how it came about? Why there’s such an anti-Western bias throughout the Middle East? You could get a lot of that information from spending hours on end following link after link on various websites, but what you’ll learn will likely be biased, fear-mongering propaganda.
Or you could pick up “Shifting Sands: The United States in the Middle East” (Columbia University Press, 2014) by Prof. Joel Migdal of the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies. As Migdal, who is fairly well known within our Jewish community, notes in his foreword, this book is based on lectures he gave on other campuses titled “The Making of the Twenty-First Century.” Its focus, however, goes back to the early part of the 20th, mostly because the jumbled mess that constitutes today’s Middle East is the direct result of decisions — we can call them bad, but isn’t hindsight always 20/20? — made 30 or 50 or 100 years ago.
Where Migdal takes a different tack, however, is in his perspective: Rather than portraying the United States as the white knight that comes in to save the day after every skirmish, coup d’etat or civil war, he digs deep to explain how even some of our most celebrated leaders over the past century couldn’t get their heads out from between their legs to figure out what was going on.
“In short, diplomacy was fraught with uncertainty and danger. Clear strategic aims did not lead either to clear tactics or a clear-cut set of policies…. Pursuing a coherent strategy turned out to be messy business.”
Part of the problem was the way our leaders at any given time put the Middle East situation into their own context: Through the frame of the Cold War, trying to use the oligarchies and dictatorships as pieces in the deadly chess game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, for example, or as an imperial power that made no bones about its decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
Even with so much access to information, getting a grasp on the region has not been easy. “For U.S. officials, recognizing and understanding the Middle East’s central dynamics, especially in a region that was so fundamentally transformed, were major challenges,” Migdal writes about changes in the region in the 1970s and beyond. “It was not immediately clear to U.S. policy makers what the changes in the region actually were, what they added up to, or how to construct sensible, effective policies in response to them.”
Coming into the 21st century, Migdal has particular enmity toward the George W. Bush administration, saying that Bush “missed the totality of the transformation that had overtaken the Middle East.” Rather than using other powers to build strong coalitions and to help defray costs, Bush’s go-it-alone strategy dearly cost America both economically and in its world standing.
Migdal is not so kind to the Obama administration, either, writing that though the president had brought in big names with vast diplomatic experience, “what was still missing from this mix of archers and arrows was a clear target. There was no comprehensive understanding of how the various hotspots, wars and other challenges that the United States faced in the area intersected with one another, so that a coherent regionwide policy could be devised.”
Instead, Migdal calls to “move away from Bush’s and Obama’s elevation of the fight to a central plank of American domestic and foreign policy and one of the pillars of strategy in the Middle East. The campaign against terror…should be seen as a chronic law-enforcement problem, one with international dimensions, but it should not be upgraded to an all-out war.” Such goals, he writes, are unattainable and “erode confidence in government and push out more attainable aims.”
While the book ends on a hopeful note, it was published before the summer, when all hell has broken loose across the region, so to get to that place of optimism may take more time than even Migdal, who more or less predicts the rise of these new terror groups by aim if not by name, may have believed.
While “Shifting Sands” has an academic tone, it is certainly approachable. The book could make a great companion piece to the multitude of book groups reading Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land,” adding context beyond just Israel, for example. Given his connection to Israel and the amount of time he has spent there, Migdal gives more attention to the Jewish State than another author writing a similar book may have done. This doesn’t take away from the importance of the overall foreign policy lesson, but it makes me wonder he fell into the same trap as rest of the world when it comes to the attention paid to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.