‘How Not to Fix the Middle East’
Dec 7th, 2009 by MESH
From MESH Admin
The Middle East policies of the Obama administration in its first year are the subject of a new number of Middle East Papers by Martin Kramer. The paper (delivered last month as a public lecture at Columbia University) argues that President Obama’s ambitious agenda has been thwarted by an internal contradiction:
The administration promised it would bring all its weight to bear on resolving the region’s conflicts. Yet at the same time, it mumbled that United States had lost a lot of weight. The administration promised to do more, even while saying, quite openly, that America must resign itself to doing less.
The result has been a power vacuum, which the region’s “middle powers” are now jostling to fill. Download here.