Bill Clinton built on that foundation, with painstaking progress throughout the 1990s but a debilitating setback at the Camp David Summit in 2000. Secretary of State James Baker masterfully orchestrated the Madrid peace conference between Arabs and Israelis, but kept his expectations in check, careful not to overpromise what might come of the long slog of negotiations. ![]() The administration brought discipline to the challenge of mobilizing the Desert Storm coalition-and to resisting the temptation to pursue fleeing Iraqi forces to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Bush administration was also less prone to magical thinking. ![]() Blessed with a stronger geopolitical position than its successors, the George H. Thomas Wright: The yes-men have taken over the Trump administrationĪ merica’s post–Cold War journey in the Middle East looked a lot more promising at first than it does today. Instead, we need a significant shift in the terms of our engagement in the region-lowering our expectations for transformation, ending our habit of indulging the worst instincts of our partners and engaging in cosmic confrontation with state adversaries, finding a more focused and sustainable approach to counterterrorism, and putting more emphasis on diplomacy backed up by military leverage, instead of the other way around. The key to playing it well will be neither restoration of the inflated ambition and over-militarization of much of the post-9/11 period nor sweeping disengagement. Our moment as the singular dominant outside player in the Middle East has faded, but we still have a solid hand to play. That leaves American policy at a crossroads. The temptations of magical thinking, the persistent tendency to assume too much about our influence and too little about the obstacles in our path and the agency of other actors, led to indiscipline and disappointments-steadily diminishing the appetite of most Americans for Middle East adventures. We let our ambitions outstrip the practical possibilities of a region where perfect is rarely on the menu, and second- and third-order consequences are rarely uplifting. In our episodic missionary zeal, especially after the terrible jolt to our system on 9/11, we tended to overreach militarily and underinvest diplomatically. Despite important achievements, we all too often misread regional currents and mismatched ends and means. I served as a career diplomat throughout most of this era, sharing in our successes as well as our failures. We have to come to grips with the deeper and more consequential betrayal of common sense-the notion that the only antidote to Trump’s fumbling attempts to disentangle the United States from the region is a retreat to the magical thinking that has animated so much of America’s moment in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War. If all this episode engenders, however, is a bipartisan dip in the warm waters of self-righteous criticism, it will be a tragedy-or worse, a mistake. It was also a betrayal of process-leaving our military leaders and diplomats struggling to keep up with tweets, our allies in the dark, our messaging all over the map, and chaos on the ground. Certainly, it was a betrayal of the Kurdish partners who bled for us in the fight against the Islamic State. ![]() With a shared sense of alarm, Republicans and Democrats alike accused Trump of betrayal. troops from Syria produced a rare moment of bipartisanship in foreign policy. P resident Donald Trump’s October decision to withdraw U.S.
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