The 2010 Arab Spring was a moment of real hope for the Middle East. Starting in Tunisia and then across the rest of the region, millions of ordinary people braved bullets and arrest to march in the streets demanding freedom, justice, and the fall of decades-old authoritarian regimes.

Yet within little more than a year, these hopes had crumbled. Yemen, Syria, and Libya descended into brutal wars that flicker on to this day. Small-scale protests in Gulf countries were crushed before they had gained momentum. Egypt’s brief encounter with parliamentary democracy fizzled in the face of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s coup, which revived in even more tyrannical form the military regime that had held sway since the 1950s. Tunisia, where it all began, was a lone bright spot, until the interference of Gulf countries and the election of an obscure professor who in 2021 suspended parliament and effectively canceled the democratic constitution introduced in 2014.

Fourteen years later, the people of the Middle East are living under regimes that are more authoritarian, not less. The region stands alone as the only part of the world without a single healthily functioning democracy—unless you include Israel, whose democratic credentials have been called into question by its treatment of the Palestinians and the rise of ultra-right-wing parties. The sect-based quasi-democracies of Lebanon and Iraq, although freer than some other countries in the region, have proved dysfunctional, ineffective, and, as evidenced by popular protests in 2019, devoid of political legitimacy in the eyes of their people. Lebanon hasn’t had an empowered government or a president since 2022.

The question is, why? Why has this one part of the world remained uniquely immune to the democratizing influences that have taken root at some point in recent history almost everywhere else? Why is the Middle East so prone to conflict that its cities—Beirut, Fallujah—have become synonymous with violence? Why has a region so rich in resources failed to deliver widespread prosperity, never mind freedom, to its long-suffering citizens?

To answer these questions, Fawaz Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and longtime commentator on the Middle East, turns to an earlier period of hope for the region, the 1940s and ’50s. This was an exciting time to be alive for the people of the Middle East. Former colonial powers Britain and France were depleted in the wake of World War II, leaving them with less energy and fewer resources to focus on their erstwhile colonies. New ideologies were taking hold as decolonization accelerated worldwide. Newly independent Arab states were seeking to assert their identities and break free of dependence on foreign powers. They were on the cusp, Gerges writes, of a new political awakening, inspired to modernize their societies and look beyond their differences to unite for a better future.

But what emerged from this pivotal era was dictatorship and conflict, setting the stage for the drumbeat of wars and succession of autocrats that define the region in the minds of most non-Middle Easterners to this day. The title of Gerges’s book, What Really Went Wrong, is a riposte to the title of a book by the historian Bernard Lewis that came out after the 9/11 attacks—What Went Wrong—in which the Middle East is portrayed as hidebound by its religion and traditions. Gerges promises to “radically rethink” the notion that the Middle East is preternaturally disposed to conflict due to the old tropes of ancient hatreds, religious conformity, and tribalism.

It is Gerges’s thesis that the real reason for the failures of the modern Middle East lies in U.S. policy toward the region in the decade following World War II, and specifically its Cold War fixation on countering the expanding influence of the Soviet Union. By prioritizing policies designed to limit the spread of communism, the United States overlooked the legitimate aspirations of the people of the region for a new world order in which they were truly free to chart their own destinies. In some instances, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, this rabid anti-communism actually drove leaders into the arms of the Soviet Union. In others, notably Iran, the United States nurtured dictators to the detriment of democratic development. And meanwhile, the United States inflamed geopolitical rivalries in the region, encouraging countries that might otherwise have gotten along, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, to compete. President Dwight Eisenhower comes in for much of the blame, with his “Cold Warrior” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the “cynical, calculating, and sinister” CIA shouldering the rest. “America’s imperial impulse, arrogance, and aggressive actions in the early years of the Cold War set off a chain of reactions and counterreactions that radically altered the direction of the region and the world,” Gerges writes.

To make his point, Gerges weaves together the stories of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who was ousted in a CIA-backed coup in 1953, and of Egypt’s President Nasser, who seized power shortly after a coup in 1952. Both leaders were “genuinely patriotic” and sought only to better the lives of their people, Gerges writes. Both were secular-leaning and leftist-inclined, but also instinctively pro-American and anti-communist, seeing the United States, with its own history of overthrowing British colonialism, as a natural counterweight to Britain and its lingering influence. Both sought the friendship and support of the United States but were rebuffed by a Washington inclined to view any manifestation of independent behavior as a sign of communist sympathies. Had the United States lent its support to these two leaders—as opposed to, say, the conservative Gulf monarchies—the Middle East could have charted a different course toward a more democratic and prosperous future, Gerges argues, not always convincingly. (There are also brief sections on Syria and Lebanon, and one chapter on Guatemala, where Gerges demonstrates that similarly detrimental policies were applied in regions outside the Middle East.)

He is on surer ground making the case that by toppling Mossadegh and throwing its weight behind the Shah, the United States set Iran on a disastrous path toward tyranny and extremism. Mossadegh was a popularly elected leader with democratic, pacifist instincts whom Gerges compares to India’s Gandhi. His fatal misstep, advocating for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was intended only to create wealth for ordinary Iranians. His biggest fault was his naivete, in believing that he could persuade the United States to counter British objections to the nationalization. Instead, after initially hesitating, Washington backed Britain’s plans for a coup and ended up playing an instrumental role in toppling Mossadegh. That, in turn, paved the way for the ruinously brutal rule of the Shah and the subsequent “blowback,” in the form of the rise of Shiite Islamist extremism and Ayatollah Khomeini’s vehemently anti-American Islamic Revolution. As Gerges notes, the term “blowback” was coined by the CIA in an internal report on the aftermath of the Mossadegh coup and its potential fallout.

Gerges is less convincing when it comes to arguing that U.S. support for Nasser would have set Egypt on the path to democracy and the region on a path to peace. Specifically, he cites the U.S. decision in 1956 to withdraw an offer to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam, which led within days to Nasser’s announcement of the nationalization of the Suez Canal on the grounds that he needed the revenue to pay for the loan the Soviet Union had offered after the United States pulled out. If the United States had stuck to its agreement to fund the dam, Gerges says, the canal would not have been nationalized, the ill-fated British-French-Israeli military intervention to snatch it back would not have happened, and Nasser would not have been so inclined to accept further Soviet support to strengthen Egypt’s army against external threats.

Nasser instead might have persisted with a tentative outreach to Israel that began in 1954 and foundered shortly before the Suez crisis. He might have reached a peace deal with Israel that would have secured rights and legitimacy for the Palestinians. The June 1967 Six-Day War would therefore not have happened, and “If the 1967 June war had not occurred, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli confrontation would not have occurred, either,” Gerges continues. He goes on to add the Arab oil embargo, its impact on the global economy, and the Lebanese civil war to the list of things that might not have happened had the United States funded the Aswan Dam. “Hope would have replaced despair. The Middle East might not have imploded,” he writes. Elsewhere in the book, the rise of Islamic extremism and the 9/11 attacks are identified as events that wouldn’t have happened if the United States had not pursued its “neo-imperial” policy of containing the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

It does start to become a bit of a stretch. The entire book is essentially a counterfactual, making the case that had certain events not happened the way they did, then this other set of events would have transpired. Inevitably, perhaps, the reader can’t help mentally countering with alternative what-ifs.

Gerges persuasively describes how Iran veered off a potentially democratic course as a direct result of the replacement of the elected Mossadegh with the tyrannical Shah. But what if Mossadegh had developed anti-democratic instincts? What if the Soviet Union decided he had hewed too closely to Washington and stepped in to topple him? If Washington’s unconditional support for the Shah encouraged his cruel and despotic tendencies, why would U.S. support for Nasser have engendered a different result and set Egypt on a path to democracy? Nasser was “not a democrat,” Gerges readily admits, although he refrains from delving into Nasser’s grim record of human rights abuses, torture, and prison camps. But, Gerges argues, Nasser wanted to develop his country and lift people out of poverty, and if the United States had not thwarted his aspirations, he might have been able to focus on creating prosperity for Egyptians rather than on buying arms from the Soviet Union and embarking on misadventures abroad.

Gerges acknowledges that other events in the Middle East also contributed to its current misfortune, such as the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. And indeed, that seems at least as important to the militarization of the region and the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism as the U.S. failure to fund the Aswan Dam. The what-ifs presented in this book only really work if many other events hadn’t transpired either.

It also isn’t clear that the book offers quite the radical rethinking that Gerges aspires to present. In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly acknowledged that toppling Mossadegh was a mistake. A 1971 analysis in The New York Times suggested that U.S. officials had also concluded that reneging on the dam deal was a mistake. Plenty of historians, analysts, experts, and journalists have made the case that U.S. policies during the global Cold War served to undermine the cause of democracy, in the Middle East and elsewhere, and that U.S. support for Middle East dictators has helped fuel the region’s chronic instability. But it is helpful to be reminded that the Middle East was not inherently anti-American as it stepped into the postcolonial era, and that with a more thoughtful policy, the United States might have averted some of the crises that have plunged the region into a cycle of destruction and despair.

What is refreshing is Gerges’s broader point: that there is nothing predetermined about the Middle East’s seeming proclivity for conflict and extremism. He writes with passion about the yearning for democracy and freedom repeatedly expressed by the region’s ordinary people, most prominently during the Arab Spring but also through the somewhat overlooked popular protests that rippled across Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Algeria in 2019, as well as in Iran in 2019 and 2022. They form part of a century-old Arab Spring that began with the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule in 1918 and continues to this day, Gerges writes. That Arab Spring is not over yet.

As the Middle East joins the rest of the world in a new era of great power competition, Gerges’s arguments gain new relevance. Frustratingly, he does not offer suggestions as to how the United States might apply the lessons of the past to the mess today. If the mistake was to not support the legitimate aspirations of the people back then, what should Western powers do now? Should the United States have offered more robust support to the 2011 uprising in Syria? Should it have refused to acquiesce in the El-Sisi coup? Are there emerging leaders it can and should support? Or was the mistake meddling in other countries at all, and it should simply stay away? Now that Russia and China are luring America’s age-old allies in the Gulf away from their reliance on the United States, should Washington be doing more to lure them back, or let them go? How do you decide where legitimacy resides in a region that has consistently suppressed popular will, often but not always with U.S. support?

The what-if game might be infuriating, but it is also infectious. At a time when democracy is receding in many parts of the world, the what-ifs and whys of how it has evaded the people of the Middle East acquire added poignancy.