Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East by Philip H. Gordon (review)

Philip Gordon has written a highly engrossing and insightful account of what he sees as the negative long-term consequences of Washington's multiple efforts to promote regime change in the Middle East and North Africa over the past seven decades. The United States' attempts at regime change in the region, Gordon writes, have produced "no case of clear success, some catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences" (p. 5). The book examines six cases of US-led regime change—Iran, Afghanistan (twice, in the 1980s and again in 2001), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Gordon's book is not designed to offer new revelations about any of these cases, but it does a remarkable job in articulating a common set of themes, policy dynamics, and lessons to be drawn from all of them. His main conclusions are twofold. First, unwanted regimes that the US contributed to removing were often replaced by something arguably much more harmful to US interests—failed states, regimes even more hostile to the US, terrorist groups gaining control of territory, or years of armed conflict. Second, as Gordon demonstrates, the rush to change regimes was driven by delusions about the ease of post–regime change transitions, a lack of historical and cultural understanding, the undue influence of opposition diaspora groups, a blindly supportive media and pundit class, and no shortage of willful naivete among top policy-makers.

Gordon achieves remarkable balance in his analysis. As a senior national security official himself, he is able to decipher the policy process, and in particular the role of individuals—starting with presidents themselves— and the worldview they bring to the decision-making table. He also points to bureaucratic divisions within the US foreign policy apparatus and how they influence policy decisions. But unlike other books by policy-makers of his stature, Gordon's book never devolves into a series of anecdotes, which frequently make for interesting reading but also fall into the trap of analytical myopia. Indeed, Gordon rarely inserts himself into the narrative at all. Despite having worked for Democratic administrations, and despite writing at a highly polarized time, his criticism is directed at presidents of both parties— and at times directed at policy decisions in which he played a part. The balance extends to his view of what role the US should play in the Middle East: he belongs neither to the school of realists and libertarians (who advocate for a highly restrained US military posture in the Middle East) nor does he associate with certain critics on the left who see any US entanglement in the region through the lens of imperialism. Indeed, he lucidly argues for a continued, active US role in the Middle East. Finally, Gordon injects an admirable dose of balance— and modesty—into his conclusions, thoughtfully engaging with his own arguments and noting for each case how alternatives to regime change policy often came with their own set of potentially unintended consequences.

With such a great diversity of cases spread over many decades in a relatively short book, there is not much space to delve into important details of historical context, some of which are consequential. Moreover, the definition of what constitutes "regime change" policy is necessarily stretched quite wide. For example, in the Iranian case, in 1953 the US and the United Kingdom used covert action to help discredit and ultimately bring down the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq. In Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, direct US military intervention toppled unfriendly regimes. In Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, the regime change effort was via proxies—the mujahideen resistance fighters, which the US covertly armed. In Libya, the NATO-led air war that the US joined was not originally designed to topple the regime of Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi, though it evolved into that. But the actual...