Suzanne Maloney
152 foreign affairs
East; rather, leaders in every major state
in the region have demonstrated an
existential reliance on the use of force.
Another, more serious drawback is the
preoccupation with interstate remedia-
tion and the near-total disregard for the
internal factors that contribute to insta-
bility in the region. The conflicts of the
Middle East did not spring fully formed
from confessional disputes or rivalries
among regional powers; each theater has
its own domestic drivers of instability,
which are usually the result of governance
failures. Addressing these factors by
strengthening accountability and legiti-
macy within states rather than between
them would help inoculate them against
the instability that cultivates proxies and
attracts regional predation in the first
place. Otherwise, it is absurd to contem-
plate a “holistic new regional order of
peaceful legality,” as Milton, Axworthy,
and Simms propose, among states
whose leaders have shown nothing but
contempt for the rule of law.
The same slogan that unleashed the
civil war in Syria—“The people want
the downfall of the regime”—is now
echoing in Algiers, Baghdad, Beirut, and
beyond. This latest wave of dissent is
undermining leaders’ authority and raising
the specter of yet more instability. The
ultimate resolution to the violence that
afflicts the Middle East and ripples far
beyond will require at least as much
attention to the internal sources of conflict
and the internal exercise of power as to
the regional. Although the authors em-
brace a nuanced interpretation of West-
phalia, their reverence for the mechanisms
that helped achieve the peace in central
Europe and institutionalize a stable
interstate order predisposes them to favor
grand-scale diplomatic ventures, which arethat over time became conflated into the
Thirty Years’ War and analyzes what
enabled the arrangements of Westphalia
to endure. But although it points out the
parallels between premodern Europe
and the contemporary Middle East almost
to a fault, the book devotes only cursory
attention to the conflicts that have roiled
the Middle East in the modern era: the
decades of strife between Arabs and
Israelis, the ruinous war between Iran and
Iraq, the insurgencies that over time
have morphed into transnational terrorist
movements. For a study that venerates
history, the analysis is oddly ahistorical.
The desultory attention to regional
conditions compromises the book’s
conclusions and recommendations.
Historical precedents can illuminate, but
prescriptions that do not take into
account local experiences are unlikely to
bear fruit. The suggestion that sectarian
violence can be corralled through some
kind of power-sharing arrangement fails
to tackle the dysfunction and frictions
that have been generated by these very
kinds of confessional pacts in both Iraq and
Lebanon. And although the Thirty
Years’ War resembled the multifarious
conflicts in the Middle East today in
important ways, it emerged on a continent
whose political customs were clearly
different. The Holy Roman Empire
depended on “a high degree of coopera-
tion, consensus and the willingness to
compromise on the part of its constituent
political parts,” and even before the
carnage of the war, early modern Europe
had developed a “peace-oriented culture”
in which “the most important actors
viewed peace as the chief norm regulating
inter-state relations.” It strains credulity
to suggest that anything of the sort has
yet emerged in the contemporary Middle