'Grand Delusion' by Steven Simon
Memoirs by former government officials could fill an entire library, with a special wing devoted to the reflections of foreign service officers. Many are tedious to read as well as self-serving. Steven Simon’s Grand Delusion is neither. Simon was sat on President Obama’s National Security Council, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. He previously served on the NSC’s staff for five years following 15 years at the State Department. Now at MIT, Simon brings an insider’s perspective and a broad historical sensibility to his account.
Simon appears in his book, but as a minor character. The protagonists are U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter through Joe Biden, and Grand Delusion is organized according to their administrations. He tells a long story of America’s “blundering efforts” to reshape the Middle East. U.S. presidents sometimes had idealistic as well as pragmatic reasons for intervening in the region, often cloaking the latter with the former. Although Simon sees the U.S. blinded by its great power status, “the frequent rejection of less costly alternative courses of action in favor of force of arms can still be mysterious and even breathtaking.”
The prelude to Grand Delusion concerns oil, the decline of British power after World War II and the Cold War. U.S. policymakers were concerned that the Soviet Union might launch a blitzkrieg through Iran and the Persian Gulf states, securing the region’s vast petroleum reserves. As the U.K. withdrew its forces from the Middle East, the U.S. “deputized” Saudi Arabia and Iran to hold the line, arming, advising and expanding their militaries.
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Carter’s landmark Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement was idealistic and pragmatic, given concerns that another war between the two nations could trigger another costly oil embargo. Carter, “perhaps distracted by the prospect of an Arab-Israeli peace, failed to anticipate an impending revolution in Iran.” The fall-out from the hostage crisis that followed still hasn’t lifted.
Failure to anticipate has been the common thread of U.S. policy in the region. And it’s not merely that the CIA or NSA are hard pressed to find information. “Evidence,” Simon writes, “is often superfluous in a system where perceived notions and conceptual frameworks derived from ideological conviction are what really matter.” Confirmation bias has ruled American foreign policy to its detriment.
Obama’s ambitions for the Middle East were benign, involving U.S. withdrawal from the feckless Iraq occupation by his predecessor, George W. Bush; refusing any temptation of forced regime change; and meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Obama was thwarted by the regime changing Arab Spring, triggering civil wars in Libya and Syria with Russian intervention. U.S.-Israeli relations were complicated by the alliance of increasingly strident right wings in both nations. Every U.S. administration has opposed Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory but as Israel grew more brazen in its disregard for international law, a tougher stand by Washington became harder to sustain. In Simon’s description, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was contemptuous of Obama.
Most of the world held Obama’s successor in contempt. “Submerged beneath the chaos” of that misadministration “were fixed ideas about the world that found expression in his presidency’s foreign policy.” The Oval Office’s occupant “conceived of the world as populated by winners and losers, conmen and suckers, and interactions as zero-sum games.” The crooked way he did business in the private sector carried over into his foreign policy.
Joe Biden? The chapter is understandably the shortest. Simon ignores the Afghanistan fiasco (perhaps just slightly outside the borders of his experience) and cites Biden’s overwhelming concern with China and Russia. His foreign policy will be nuanced, restoring the status quo under Obama. Whether intransigent Republicans in Congress will support him on any issue beyond China is a question to be answered in the future.
