Издательство:

Penguin Press

Год:

2023

Описание:

In addition to being an account of a forty-year span of U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, this book is a memoir, if one in which the narrator is largely hidden from view. Although the book is not about me, I was involved in much of the action from the middle of Ronald Reagan’s first term, when I began at the State Department, through the early part of Barack Obama’s second term, when I was engaged in an unofficial effort to reduce the level of violence in the Syrian conflict. Thus, the book implicitly covers the trajectory of one participant’s career that happens to map neatly onto the arc of U.S. activism in the Middle East. My first assignment as a young civil servant was to game out a diplomatic strategy to facilitate the Reagan administration’s plans for military operations in the Middle East; my last government post, as National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, ended at the White House, witnessing Obama’s refusal to attack Iran or to put boots on the ground in Syria.

While this personal dimension is of little intrinsic interest, it was important to the conception and execution of this book. The narrative emerges from the imaginative space between the worldview of the author as witness and as historian. Although I am today far from the person I was as a government official, I remember that person, his perceptions, and emotions, and therefore the mood and aspirations that permeated the policy process over that span of three decades. In my view, the reconciliation of those recollections, and the historical understanding that evolved as the book was written, separate this book from others that have covered all or part of this epoch of war and diplomacy in the Middle East.

Ключевые слова: Ближний Восток, США, дипломатия, внешняя политика, история.