Book Review: ‘Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East’ by Philip H Gordon

Abstract

Philip Gordon is currently Deputy National Security Adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, previously serving in the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2009-13), and White House Co-ordinator for the Middle East (2013-15). He has also worked as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Losing the Long Game follows from his previous works, notably Winning the Right War: The Path to Security for America and the World (2008), by asserting that ‘incompetent officials from both major parties [fail] to find the magic formula for making [regime change] a success’ but that there is also ‘something inherently difficult and inevitably costly about removing Middle Eastern governments and institutions and replacing them with something better’ (p. 11). In short, both flawed decision-making and the inherent limitations of the concept of regime change contribute to US failures in the Middle East. Losing the Long Game is temporally limited to the post-war era, with Gordon forcefully arguing that US attempts at regime change have resulted in regional instability and undermined US interests. The aim of the book is to explain why these failures have occurred, with Gordon offering ‘lessons’ in the conclusion; what he does not do is offer