Lawfare Daily: The End of U.S. Ambition in the Middle East with Steven Cook
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2024
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this episode, Lawfare General Counsel and Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Steven Cook to discuss his new book, “The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.” Together, they examined the United States’ long history in the Middle East, how it successfully (and unsuccessfully) pursued its interests there, and what should come next after the failed transformations of the post-9/11 era.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the Lawfair Podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. That's Patreon.com |
| 0:16.4 | slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.0 | If we're concerned about great power competition in the Middle East and around the globe |
| 0:36.4 | and we need partners to achieve those kinds of things. |
| 0:39.2 | If we are worried about preventing threats to Israeli security, we put ourselves at a disadvantage by |
| 0:47.1 | engaging in this kind of transformative efforts to make other societies look more like us when they don't necessarily want that from us. |
| 0:56.0 | It's the Law Fair Podcast. I'm Scott R Anderson, general counsel and senior editor at Law Fair |
| 1:01.8 | with Stephen Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. |
| 1:05.0 | We need to devote our resources not to the idea of reviving the Palestinian Authority, |
| 1:10.0 | which is deeply compromised in the eyes of most Palestinians and deeply corrupt, |
| 1:14.0 | but to prevent the Israelis from resettling the God's Strip, |
| 1:18.0 | because everything that we want to do in the region, |
| 1:20.0 | even within my ideas about prudential conservatism would be blown up by that. |
| 1:26.0 | Today we are discussing his new book The End of Ambition America's Past, Present, and future in the Middle East. |
| 1:33.0 | Stephen, in this book you have put together a tour to force, I think it's fair to say. |
| 1:38.0 | A broad survey historically, policy-wise, every corner of the region touching even a few areas that people argue historically policy |
| 1:44.1 | that people argue whether it's part of the region or not Afghanistan policy things like that on occasion to kind of pull together this holistic picture with elements of prescription, elements of criticism, a lot of |
| 1:55.1 | content, a lot of observations crammed into 150 short, very readable pages, which is |
| 2:00.8 | greatly appreciated by many. I enjoy my hundreds of pages books but this one was a |
| 2:04.8 | delightfully pleasant, straightforward and really not dense but informative read. |
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