Suzanne Maloney
150 foreign affairs
million internally displaced. The conflict
has also embroiled a cast of regional
actors and great powers in ways that will
reverberate long after the violence abates.
Syria is also the burial ground for
the ambitions of a never-ending series of
intermediaries, diplomats, tactical inter-
ventions, and would-be peacemakers. But
Milton, Axworthy, and Simms are not
daunted by this miserable track record.
Past diplomacy, they argue, failed because
it was construed too narrowly to succeed.
The authors are certainly no friends of
timid diagnoses or partial solutions; after
a brief tour of the horizon, they appraise
the “various wars, cold wars and crises”
underway in the Middle East—including
the Syrian disaster—not “as distinct
conflicts” in various countries with
individualized geneses but as “a single
regional crisis afflicting the Middle East.”
Most of the region’s troubles, they
contend, derive from a lack of state
legitimacy, sectarianism, and the compe-
tition for influence between Iran and
Saudi Arabia. In this, the Middle East
recalls the Europe of the Thirty Years’
War: a war-torn region in which localized
conflicts quickly spin out of control and
draw in regional powers, with horrendous
humanitarian consequences.FALSE HOPES
On the basis of this diagnosis, the authors
call for “a wider ‘grand bargain’ that
seeks to address all the conflicts that are
raging across the Middle East today,”
based explicitly on the Peace of West-
phalia. They envision a peace congress that
engages all the antagonists, is launched
even as hostilities still rage, and lasts
for as long as necessary, years even. The
resulting agreement would account for
the security interests of all the leadingrather than a virtue” (in the words of
two of them, Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri),
and so they have often refused to insert
themselves into policy debates. But at a
time when emotion and partisanship have
replaced factual evidence, some histori-
ans have sought a much wider audience
in an effort to refute falsehoods and add
nuance to sanitized or oversimplified
interpretations of the past.
This sense of professional and moral
responsibility seems to have driven the
authors of this book and the phalanx of
funders and government officials who
contributed to the discussions that under-
pin it. “Memory is essential—it makes us
what we are; it is the same with history,
collectively,” Axworthy implores in his
foreword, adding, “Westphalia has
something to tell us.” Reflecting on the
agonies of early modern Europe should
also refute the notion that the Middle East
is a historical outlier and show that
endemic violence need not be a perma-
nent condition. It could, in other words,
reinject a measure of faith in the possi-
bility of diplomacy in a region that much
of the West has written off as mired in
“sand and death,” as Trump himself so
crudely put it.
At the heart of the book is a profound
sense of urgency about ending the
bloodshed in Syria. The Syrian civil war
is not the oldest conflict in the region—
the war in Afghanistan predates it by
nearly a decade—and it is uncharacteris-
tic in that Western powers have managed
to keep their interventions in it limited.
Still, Milton, Axworthy, and Simms
rightly identify the Syrian war as the
region’s most grievous conflagration, with
hundreds of thousands of Syrians either
killed or injured, nearly six million
forced to flee the country, and another six