What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East

Provoked by Bernard Lewis’s 2002 book What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, Gerges argues against attributing the problems in the Middle East—particularly the failure of democratic politics—to cultural or civilizational factors. Instead, he locates the principal cause in U.S. foreign policy at the dawn of the Cold War, and he uses the U.S.-backed coup against Iran’s nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and the break with Egypt’s nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s to illustrate the imposition of what he calls the United States’ “informal empire.” It was specific U.S. policies designed to hobble nonaligned nationalism, not any deep-seated Middle Eastern religious or cultural misunderstanding, that gave rise to the succeeding decades of skepticism about democratic politics and suspicion of the United States. Gerges speculates about what might have happened had the Eisenhower administration been less in thrall to anticommunism and more sympathetic to the nationalist aspirations of the day. In a brief discussion of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, who was overthrown by a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 1954, Gerges shows this American preoccupation was hardly unique to the Middle East. Acknowledging the perils of counterfactual history, he suggests that another path, less autocratic and more prosperous, might have been possible.