The Muddle East

When it comes to the Middle East, Obama’s presidency has largely been predicated on two ideas: A hegemonic America is a bad thing, and the second Iraq war was a serious mistake. We and Middle Eastern Muslims would coexist more harmoniously, so Obama has thought, if Washington were less bellicose. The fight against al Qaeda and support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process—once, and perhaps still, the epicenter of the president’s understanding of the region—would both advance if Washington were more dovish and reticent in the Middle East. The president’s vaunted 2009 Cairo speech, which was coolly received by secular Egyptian democratic dissidents, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, was the personal outreach of a man who really believed that he, with his mixed race and religious pedigree, was an ambassador to a new age of better relations between Islam and the West.