CFR’s Steven Cook: U.S.’s Ambitions, Failures & Future in the Middle East

CFR’s Steven Cook: U.S.’s Ambitions, Failures & Future in the Middle East

December 3, 2024 @ 07:00 PM to December 3, 2024 @ - 08:00 PM
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6:30 – 7:00pm – Registration & Networking
7:00 – 8:00pm – Program

About the Event:

Following a long series of catastrophic misadventures in the Middle East over the last two decades, the American foreign policy community has tried to understand what went wrong. After weighing the evidence, they have mostly advised a retreat from the region. The basic view is that when the United States tries to advance change in the Middle East, it only makes matters worse.

Steven A. Cook argues that while these analysts are rightly concerned that engagement drains U.S. resources and distorts its domestic politics, the broader impulse to disengage tends to neglect important lessons from the past. Moreover, advocates of pulling back overlook the potential risks of withdrawal. Covering the relationship between the United States and the Middle East since the end of World War II, Cook makes the bold claim that despite setbacks and moral costs, the United States has been overwhelmingly successful in protecting its core national interests in the Middle East. Conversely, overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage U.S. power not only ended in failure, but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways.

While making the case that retrenchment is not the answer to America’s problems in the Middle East, Cooks presents how America’s interests in the region have begun to change and critically examines alternative approaches to U.S.-Middle East policy. He also highlights the challenges that policymakers and analysts confront in developing a new strategy for the United States in the Middle East against the backdrop of both political uncertainty in the United States and a changing global order.

About the Speaker:

Steven A. Cook, Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies

Steven A. Cook is Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy.

Cook is the author of False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle EastThe Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square, which won the 2012 gold medal from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Ruling but Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.

Cook is also the author of the recently published Oxford University Press book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.

Ticket Information

Member • 12.03.2024
Free
End: December 3, 2024 05:00 PM
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End: December 3, 2024 05:00 PM
Student / Educator • 12.03.2024
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Date And Time

December 3, 2024 @ 07:00 PM to December 3, 2024 @ - 08:00 PM
 

Location

Junior League of Houston | 1811 Briar Oaks Dr, Houston TX 77027
 

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