Grand Delusion
The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East
“A comprehensive, even magisterial review . . . This is strong stuff, but Simon does not flinch.” —Foreign Affairs
A longtime American foreign policy insider’s penetrating and definitive reckoning with this country’s involvement in the Middle East
The culmination of almost forty years at the highest levels of policymaking and scholarship, Grand Delusion is Steven Simon’s tour de force, offering a comprehensive and deeply informed account of U.S. engagement in the Middle East. Simon begins with the Reagan administration, when American perception of the region shifted from a cluster of faraway and frequently skirmishing nations to a shining, urgent opportunity for America to (in Reagan’s words) “serve the cause of world peace and the future of mankind.”
Reagan fired the starting gun on decades…
$42.00
April 11, 2023
Steven Simon served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs from 2011 to 2012. He also worked on the NSC staff from 1994 to 1999 on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy. These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State. Between government assignments, he was Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, analyst at the RAND Corporation, and deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies; he is currently a Senior Analyst at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co-author, among other books, of The Age…
Grand Delusion
Steven Simon