MYTHS, ILLUSIONS, & PEACE

Archive for the ‘Reviews of the Book’ Category

Myths, Illusions, & Peace is the subject of an insightful new review entitled “What the US Can and Can’t Do in the Middle East” by Shlomo Avineri, one of Israel’s foremost political scientists and a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The review has been released in the first issue of a brand new quarterly, the Jewish Review of Books.

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

The scope of American power, in the Middle East or anywhere else, depends on circumstances and local conditions. Yet Washington policy wonks all too often tend to overlook this uncomfortable fact, viewing situations exclusively from inside the Beltway.

Throughout the many decades of US involvement in the Middle East, there is a pattern of success as well as failure, and it is this pattern that constitutes the backdrop to the knowledgeable and timely new book by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky—the one a veteran of Mideast peace negotiations under several American presidents, the other a seasoned journalist and analyst.

The United States has been and can be extremely powerful and helpful when either of the following scenarios unfolds: 1) a shooting war erupts and threatens to unleash dire regional or even global consequences or 2) the contending parties have already made, on their own, significant steps towards reaching an agreement but still need a helpful push from the outside. In the first case, the US can function as an effective firefighter and bring about a cessation of hostilities. In the second, it can act as a midwife and help clinch the deal.