America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East
Based in Washington, DC, and working as the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Cook has been writing about Middle East politics for almost 20 years, culminating with his latest book, The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East.(Oxford University Press, 2024).
“We have a very complicated relationship with this part of the world,” Cook says, “And I think that’s part of the problem that I’m having with the current discourse [about Israel and Gaza]. People want to drain away the complexities not only of that issue, but the complexities of American foreign policy in this part of the world, in favor of moral absolutes. And that gets you nowhere.”
The End of Ambition aims to unpack the nuanced relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East, and position U.S. foreign policy in the region into three distinct eras: an era of success, a period of failure, and present uncertainty. Cook doesn’t want to give away too much about the finer points of those arguments—“you’ll have to read the book for that,” he says—but shares the launching point for the book’s core thesis.
“The Middle East remains important to the United States, regardless of 25 to 30 years of policy failures in the region,” he says. “Those policy failures are a function of America. I call it kind of an American fever dream that after the Cold War, the U.S. had the power and insight and knowledge to transform the Middle East. And we need to get away from that sort of idealism and understand the region as it is.”
Cook’s fascination with Middle East politics, policy, and power struggles began early when he was a pre-teen in Long Island. The travel bug struck his parents, and, he says, “I loved all those vacations we all took together, and visiting family in the UK when I was nine. That really got me curious about the world.”
At 12, when he was asked to name his favorite TV show, he would say “the nightly news.” When his friends got the newspaper, they all flipped to the sports section first, but Cook beelined it for the front page.
And in the seventh grade, his parents let him stay up late to watch Ted Koppel’s Nightline series on the 444-day-long Iran hostage crisis, during which Iranian militants held 52 Americans captive.
When it came time to consider colleges, Cook remembers visiting the Vassar campus to gauge if it felt like the next scholarly home for his interests in international studies. Cook’s mom said to him, “Yes, we’ll meet professors and learn about the school, but take time to look around and see if Vassar is the right fit for you, if you’re surrounded by your people.”
He did just that on an impressively beautiful afternoon, and when he surveyed the campus, he saw “interesting students, and a bunch of guys playing cricket, of all things, and right away I turned to my mom and said, ‘Write the check. I’m going to Vassar.’”
In his sophomore year, he was especially struck by a course led by visiting professor Hamideh Sedghi that analyzed Iranian politics and foreign policy. “It was a fascinating course, and it was truly one of the best courses I took, and that’s what I began to think of the intellectual environment at Vassar. Everyone seemed so engaged.”
After graduating in 1990, he earned a master’s in international affairs at John Hopkins. His political science PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 led to his first published book, a sign of his interests to come: Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Johns Hopkins Press, 2007) is admittedly a “heavily theoretical book that I tried to revise to make it as accessible as possible,” he says. His fascination with the Arab Spring in Egypt inspired him to write his 2017 book False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East (Oxford University Press). And just like his parents, he was able to travel overseas to learn more about other cultures, from Turkey to Egypt to Israel.
What he reveals in the book is a stark truth about the Arab Spring’s failure: “In Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, you don’t have social revolutions. You have changes of leadership. The regime never falters so the protesters never overthrow the political system,” Cook notes.
At the CFR, his consistent obligation is to spread his ideas on Middle East policy and the relationship the U.S. cultivates with partners in the region. He writes regularly for Foreign Policy magazine and for the CFR website. He can’t picture doing anything else right now.
Cook admits, “I get out of bed every day and feel blessed with the fact I can pursue my intellectual interests, and do my best to offer the best way forward for the United States in a very critical part of the world.”
Up next for Cook is a project, yet to be fully shaped, about India’s rise and influence. “When we think about great powers, we think United States, China, Russia,” Cook says. “India is often an afterthought. It shouldn’t be.”