America & the Middle East: The Way Forward — Steven A. Cook with Bret Stephens

Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattel Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is one of the most highly regarded experts on America’s foreign policy towards the Middle East.

His new book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, offers a “prudent, compelling, and sober” (Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal) critical assessment of the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods — the over-ambition when the US sought to remake the Middle East, and the under-ambition of the post-Iraq War period when many simply wanted to get out. New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens joins Cook for a multi-dimensional analysis of what – catastrophically — went wrong, and how overly ambitious policies to remake the region and leverage US power not only ended in failure but rendered the region unstable in new and largely misunderstood ways. As the Middle East takes on a position of central importance in the run-up to the US elections, Cook and Stephens share their views on the challenges that policymakers and analysts must confront in developing a new strategy for the United States in the area — against the backdrop of both political uncertainty in the US and a changing global order.