The Mirage of Middle East Peace

Robert Kaplan’s new book explores how the region has historically wobbled between order and chaos.

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People shout slogans as a ceremony is held to support the Ethiopian military troops who are battling against the Tigrays People Liberation Front on November 7, 2021, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images)

If Robert Kaplan’s The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China had not been released earlier this year, one could imagine him scrambling to rewrite the introduction of his wide-ranging treatise on political order in the Middle East in light of recent events. After all, the merciless Hamas terrorists responsible for the attacks in Israel had once been the unexpected beneficiaries of elections that U.S. officials had hoped would produce a moderate Palestinian government. Yet following their victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative polls, Hamas promptly executed political rivals, extended an iron grip over the Gaza Strip, and began building the terrorist command-and-control capabilities gruesomely displayed on October 7. The 2006 elections were Gaza’s last.

Kaplan—a longtime foreign affairs reporter for The Atlantic and a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute—argues in his latest book that stability in the Middle East is elusive. Chaos, in his view, always lurks beneath the surface, and elections fail to produce peace in a region with such acute fault lines. The past few weeks sadly seem to bolster his pessimistic claims.

Kaplan has made some essential contributions in his time—his work recentering the primacy of geography in international relations stands out—as well as a few alarmist dispatches that don’t hold up as well. This latest book seems principally concerned with atoning for Kaplan’s initial support for the Iraq War, which he now considers his greatest failure as a writer. If Kaplan’s self-professed hatred for Saddam Hussein’s totalitarianism blinded him to the risks of an intervention in 2003, The Loom of Time warns against similar involvement in the Middle East.

Kaplan’s latest work is a characteristically informative and enjoyable mix of travelog, history, and geopolitical analysis. It’s refreshingly provocative in some important regards, but also repetitive and simplistic in places. Yet few authors are in the position to write such a book as Kaplan, one that blends decades of first-person reporting in the region with a broad familiarity with Middle Eastern history and societies. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    David Chen

    For starters, get rid of the damn UN. If there's one thing crappy countries didn't have in the past, it was the ability to form clubs with other crappy countries and help crappy leaders learn how to stay in power. The UN creates a power structure that incentives this with its faux-democracy. Russia is more than happy to send the Wagner group to help tin pot dictators in Africa stay in power, because that is one more vote for them in the UN. China is more than happy to tell them how to install surveillance on their people, cause it is one more vote. Same with Belt and Road.

    People might yearn for freedom and in olden days, they might occasionally revolt and build something better. But one country's peasants will not beat the combined will of all the leaders of the Club of Assholes.

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    1. Ellen in Wis

      What I think is good about the UN is that asshole countries get to speak out about and vote against things that the rest of the world thinks are good, thus showing their true colors.

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  2. Diryn

    Not the subject of the article but the Burke epigraph can also easily apply to the outrage politics of our time.

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  3. Lee2253

    Give them another thousand years. Western civilization took a long time too.

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    1. Avatar photo
      David Chen

      Give them another ten thousand years and nothing will change. Asshole leaders are very good at learning from each other and helping each other now.

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    2. Avatar photo
      3ld3r

      It's not just time. The West gained and accepted a tradition regarding the worth of each individual soul and universal truth. It has Greek philosopher and Jewish carpenter teachings about the nature of man. These thoughts directly lead to liberal democratic capitalism.

      With the different philosophical foundations found in the Middle East and Asian landmass, do they have a philosophical foundation on which to build?

      I'm not trying to be chauvinist, I am interested in learning more about this region.

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  4. Avatar photo
    The Stray Goose

    Good article.

    Kaplan’s second, more forceful argument is that the root causes of the Middle East’s fractious politics necessitate a “realist” foreign policy toward the region, one that prioritizes order over liberty. The alternative, he argues—with no shortage of historical evidence—is anarchy.

    The Iraq war was spun as a twofer. Liberation for the Iraqi people from Hussein's terror and stability for the region after we end his attacks on his neighbors. No, it didn't turn out that way. We didn't account for the chaos Iran was happy to inflict on Iraq and the rest of the region.

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