The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid.

• Author: Rezeg, Ali Abo
• Position: Book review

The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid

By Walid Phares

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 245 pages, $27.00, ISBN: 9781137279033

The book under review is a work by American-Lebanese scholar Walid Phares, who specializes in Middle East politics. He has worked in different advisory positions in the U.S., most notably, within the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Congress. In 2012, he served as Mitt Romney's advisor for Middle East affairs during the latter's presidential candidacy. In 2016, he played the same role for then candidate Donald Trump. He is the author of The Confrontation, Future Jihad, and The War of Ideas.

The book consists of fourteen chapters, starting with "Western Failure to Predict the 2011 Uprisings," and ending with "Alternative Policies Regarding the Middle East." In his preface, Phares refers to the 2009 "Green Revolution" in Iran and the 2011 Arab spring as a historical opportunity for the U.S. and the Western powers, which they could have taken advantage of with a view to weakening or even defeating "the global and Jihadi terror." According to Phares, the U.S. and the West embraced wrongheaded policies when dealing with these events, which caused them to lose this unprecedented opportunity.

In terms of the 2009 protests in Iran, which Phares describes as a "revolution," he argues that these protests were able to threaten the Islamic regime for the first time since its establishment in 1979, with much of the world believing that the regime was about to crumble. The biggest U.S. policy mistake, according to Phares, was Obama Administration's "weak and ineffective" positions, which were unable to support the grassroots movement. Hence, statements emanating from the White House at the time were considered a green light for the mullahs and ayatollahs to crush the civil unrest instead of making any concessions to the protesters. Thus, the letter sent by the new U.S. administration in 2009 to the Ahmadinejad regime suggested that the tough years during the previous George W Bush Administration--and the era of unconditional U.S. support for the Iranian opposition-were over, and a new era of "engagement" had begun.

Regarding 2011's "Arab spring," Phares believes that two speeches delivered by Obama in Cairo and Istanbul in 2009 were both milestones in terms of U.S. Middle East policy, with both speeches marking the beginning of what Phares describes as "the American-Islamist alliance" in the...