Getting Smart about America’s Middle East Policy

I deeply appreciate the generosity of Elliott Abrams, Martin Kramer, and Steven Cook in providing thoughtful responses to “The Strategy Washington Is Pursuing in the Middle East Is the Only Strategy Worth Pursuing.” I’ll offer my reactions to their arguments—with each of which I respectfully disagree—one by one.

In my essay, I describe what I see as a coherent strategy toward the Middle East taking shape in the Trump administration. Elliott Abrams, for his part, sees no common worldview or sense of collective purpose at all. “[T]he decisions of the past two years,” he writes,

may instead reflect the many individuals who have affected decision-making (Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, James Mattis, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and for that matter Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Benjamin Netanyahu, etc.), not to mention the president’s own changes of mind.