Hello, modern war listeners. This is Captain Jake Maraldi.

Today on the podcast, we'll be talking to Dr. Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel and professor at Boston University, about his new book, America's War for the Greater Middle East.

We'll talk to him about the larger war in the Middle East over the past 30 years and how to develop complex thinkers who are well equipped to handle the challenges and difficulties presented by modern war.

As always, the views expressed in this podcast are the opinions of the respective participants and are not the official position of the United States government.

This is the Modern War Institute podcast.

All right, well, Dr. Bresovich, good to have you on the podcast today.

I want to jump right in sort of talking about your recent book and you outline or cover a pretty significant chunk of Middle East history,

probably over the last century, can you sort of outline with the major themes you were talking about where?

Yeah, sure.

The book's called America's War for the Greater Middle East, and the subtitle of the book is a military history.

I think the subtitle is very important in this context, because my aim in writing the book was to construct a narrative that recounts U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world since 1980.

And I chose 1980 as the start point for the narrative for a very important reason.

And the reason is that's the year that President Jimmy Carter

promulgated what we have subsequently come to call the Carter Doctrine. And the Carter Doctrine

was a statement designating the Persian Gulf, a U.S. vital national security interest.

In that speech, in that State of the Union address of January 1980,

Carter emphasized that when he said vital U.S. national security interest,

he meant that the Persian Gulf was now designated a place that we viewed as worth fighting for.

And the reason it's important to recall that is that prior to 1980, it wasn't a place.

We thought we should fight for, would fight for, or were prepared to fight for.

Prior to 1980, U.S. military involvement in that region was minimal.

Prior to 1980, we were certainly geared up to fight for Western Europe,

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