We turn now to America’s role in a changing Middle East. Israel has set up an internal inquiry into its deadly attack last month on the Gaza-bound flotilla of humanitarian aid ships. The attack left eight Turks and one Turkish-American dead. Meanwhile Turkey, along with Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel swap agreement with Iran and then voted against a UN Security Council resolution last week that imposed another round of sanctions on Iran. Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Stephen Kinzer is out with a new book that looks back into history to make sense of some of these shifting alliances in the Middle East and to chart a new vision for US foreign policy in the region.
Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's FutureStephen Kinzer
The bestselling author of Overthrow offers a new and surprising vision for rebuilding America's strategic partnerships in the Middle East
What can the United States do to help realize its dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East? Stephen Kinzer offers a surprising answer in this paradigm-shifting book. Two countries in the region, he argues, are America's logical partners in the twenty-first century: Turkey and Iran.
Besides proposing this new "power triangle," Kinzer also recommends that the United States reshape relations with its two traditional Middle East allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. This book provides a penetrating, timely critique of America's approach to the world's most volatile region, and offers a startling alternative.
Kinzer is a master storyteller with an eye for grand characters and illuminating historical detail. In this book he introduces us to larger-than-life figures, like a Nebraska schoolteacher who became a martyr to democracy in Iran, a Turkish radical who transformed his country and Islam forever, and a colorful parade of princes, politicians, women of the world, spies, oppressors, liberators, and dreamers.
Kinzer's provocative new view of the Middle East is the rare book that will richly entertain while moving a vital policy debate beyond the stale alternatives of the last fifty years.
