Sacrificing democracy to save Israel

DECEMBER 14, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region,  by Marc Lynch, published by Hurst.

US foreign policy in the region became a lot clearer to Marc Lynch once he realised that “America doesn’t seem willing to accept that people in the Middle East are actually human beings.” Moreover, “this refusal to recognize the humanity of those under US domination resembles the core pathology that enabled European colonialism, the slave trade, the Holocaust and most of the great evils of world history.”

His book starts with an account of Israel’s deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, refugee shelters, journalists, aid workers and civilian housing after the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023, followed by its expansion of the conflict into other countries in the region. Despite the massive student protest movement that swept across the US, the Biden administration refused to use its leverage over Israel to push for an end to the war. Instead it threatened sanctions against organisations like the International Criminal Court that pursued accountability. But Biden’s indifference to Palestinian death and destruction was not exceptional – just the latest example of long-standing US policy in the region that  dates back to the Cold War.

The expectation that Palestinians will somehow welcome the replacements that the US has chosen to govern them – particularly Tony Blair! – is reminiscent of the failed Iraq policy: years of Western sanctions which killed up to half a million children, followed by bombardment and invasion accompanied by the absurd belief that the occupiers would be welcomed as ‘liberators’.

US Middle East policy has for decades been based on the assumption that backing and arming friendly autocratic regimes is the best way to secure order. This is why the many US democracy programs in the region could never be allowed to produce democracy, which might challenge that autocratic rule.

Under American primacy, the Middle East has become one of the most militarised regions in the world. No wonder that for the overwhelming majority of Arab people polled across the region, the US, which views itself as the provider of security in the Middle East, is seen as the biggest threat to their security. Washington of course not only dismisses this outlook – it minimises its own responsibility for events in the region, preferring narratives about ancient sectarian conflicts.

Lynch’s survey takes us through the 1980s and 1990s, exploring the potential of the Palestinian Intifada of these years. “Perhaps because it represented a peak moment of Palestinian agency and centred nonviolence resistance rather than war, it has been oddly erased, or at least neglected, by most accounts of the region’s evolution.” American pundits, suggests Lynch, still ask “where is the Palestinian Gandhi?” decades after the nonviolent kind of mass mobilisation he championed was brutally suppressed by Israel.

In reality, the author argues, the US has not only given up on even the semblance of a Middle East peace process in the last quarter of a century: it has effectively abandoned any commitment to international law as far as Israel is concerned. “Why should countries rally to the side of the United States in defence of Ukraine,” asks Lynch, “if the US makes clear that it has no objection in principle to war crimes or the conquest of territory by force?”

US policy towards the Palestinians was echoed in the pursuit of Clinton-era sanctions against, and Bush Jr’s violent invasion of, Iraq: both displayed a contemptuous lack of concern for the human cost of their actions and indifference to Arab lives. Today, it is standard for US policymakers to claim that the ‘threat’ from Iraq was exaggerated, and so forth, while overlooking the real reasons for the invasion – both plunder and the need for a “performative war”. As right wing pundit Jonah Goldberg put it, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

If judged by its rhetoric, the Obama administration might appear to break with this long-established approach. But the US’s continued refusal to recognise a Palestinian state under Obama’s leadership underlines its refusal to treat Palestinians as equals under international law. Again, despite the rhetoric, continuity in Middle East policy was the dominant feature of the first Trump administration as well.

Biden too, despite huge differences on other areas of policy, opted to build on Trump’s approach in the Middle East, focusing on a security-oriented priority of normalising Saudi-Israel relations – all while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. When the Hamas attack of October 2023 took place, it was in a context not only of no meaningful negotiations towards a solution for twenty years, but also of escalating Israeli violence against Palestinians in which US policymakers expressed little interest.

Similarly, the US placed no serious constraints on the genocide unleashed by Israel after October 7th – in fact they armed and supported it. Lynch says: “Biden’s stubborn refusal to call for an end to the killing presented a dilemma even to Israeli leaders, who understood well that Israel’s wars generally only end when America imposes a ceasefire.” Instead the Biden administration allowed Israel to escalate the conflict by opening several new fronts beyond its borders.

Lynch provides an excellent analysis. Perhaps his book’s biggest weakness is its hopeful belief that US policy can break from its militarist and racist mindset towards the Arab world. The fundamental continuity he highlights in policy between presidents as strikingly different as Clinton and Bush, Obama and Trump suggests this optimism may be misplaced.

Maybe a defeat for, rather than a modification of, US policy in the region is more likely. As he predicts, “Its efforts to sustain the old Middle East will involve ever greater direct application of military force  and repressive power, the clearest signal of dwindling legitimacy and the failure of hegemony.” And that repression is now intensifying against campus protests against the genocide at home.

Lynch led a task force in 2023 and 2024 documenting the breadth of institutional assault on scholars and students who spoke out on Gaza. Over three-quarters of 500 scholars surveyed felt the need to self-censor when speaking in a professional capacity about the conflict; the overwhelming majority said the current period was the most difficult in their academic career. The policy of sacrificing democracy to save Israel, so long practised in the Middle East, is now ripping through the US itself.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.