U.S.-Israel relations are and always have been, as Ross’s book shows, complicated and characterized by oscillation - a picture far less clear than that presented by modern critics who see undue American Jewish influence as this relationship’s signal property. For that alone, this book is valuable: big subjects in foreign policy often cast shadows over just how much the birth or death of various ideas about them owe to human emotion and intellectual limitations.

government that were as instrumental in shaping its policy as any external event. Ross teases out continuity and differences therein, and analyzes the power dynamics and interpersonal conflicts within the U.S. Rather, it is a blow-by-blow examination of the key events that drove each administration’s Israel policy and its Middle East policy more generally. strategy on Israel from the years immediately preceding its creation to the present, a form that that does not admit much moralizing on either side of the question. Doomed to Succeed is structured as a succinct administration-by-administration account of U.S. Ross does not effect his criticism via polemic. It is also, as such, a chronicle of the history of this fallacy, and a criticism of it - one that the world needs to hear.

adventures in policymaking over more than six decades.

His valuable new book, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 474 pp., $30.00), is studious and measured in tone, as is only appropriate for a scrupulous insider account of U.S. He discovers it, as well, within the political work of his predecessors. Bush, as Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy, and as a key adviser to Barack Obama on issues in the region. One of the keenest observers both of the broader Middle East and that long and hard-fought conflict, Dennis Ross spent years in government observing this fallacy at work directly, as a newly-minted State Department official, as the Director of Policy Planning under George H.W. One of the great fallacies in thinking about the Middle East has been to place the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians at the center of the region’s troubles. closeness to Israel is not a hindrance to peace, argues Dennis Ross.

Doomed to Succeed by Dennis Ross