Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future

by Stephen Kinzer

The bestselling author of Overthrow offers a new and surprising vision for rebuilding America's strategic partnerships in the Middle East What can the United States do to help realize its dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East? Stephen Kinzer offers a surprising answer in this paradigm-shifting book. Two countries in the region, he argues, are America's logical partners in the twenty-first Turkey and Iran. Besides proposing this new "power triangle," Kinzer also recommends that the United States reshape relations with its two traditional Middle East allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. This book provides a penetrating, timely critique of America's approach to the world's most volatile region, and offers a startling alternative. Kinzer is a master storyteller with an eye for grand characters and illuminating historical detail. In this book he introduces us to larger-than-life figures, like a Nebraska schoolteacher who became a martyr to democracy in Iran, a Turkish radical who transformed his country and Islam forever, and a colorful parade of princes, politicians, women of the world, spies, oppressors, liberators, and dreamers. Kinzer's provocative new view of the Middle East is the rare book that will richly entertain while moving a vital policy debate beyond the stale alternatives of the last fifty years.

Genres: History, Politics, Middle East, Iran, Nonfiction, International Relations, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 8, 2010

About the author

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him "among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling." (source)

Reviews

[Defneandac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about American politics in the Middle East. Focusing especially on Turkey and Iran, Kinzer tells the history of Middle East in the 20th century.Stephen Kinzer is a very experienced journalist who has covered the region for New York Times. Starting in the 19th century and coming to 2010 he tells the story of Middle East and US. Israel and Saudi Arabia has been the main US allies in the the region since the WW2. Kinzer tells us how the world has changed and how US's policies and allies must change, too. Giving examples of American foreign policy failures in the region, Kinzer suggests Iran and Turkey should be US's main allies, because this two countries are the only ones with the democratic past and traditions.

It is a very easy book to read and great opportunity to start reading about Middle East. Kinzer has the rare talent of writing crystal clear about complicated issues.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some have complained that though this is supposed to be about Turkey and Iran, it deviates (though not uninterestingly) into Israel and Saudi Arabia. My copy is a UK version which makes it clear that the objective is not just a discussion of Turkey and Iran, but a re-assessment of those two countries and why they are the best Middle-Eastern allies for the US, and why the traditional best friends of America, Israel and Saudi, are not.

Anyway it's mostly a straightforward and easily-digested narrative of the development of these four modern countries. I was principally interested in Turkey (partly because I work for a Gülen school, though no one there has actually mentioned that) and it does give a thorough and, as far as I can say, balanced account of Atatürk's achievements and shortcomings, continuing through the violent 60s-70s-80s, to the new moderate Islamicist (discuss...) regime under Erdoğan and Davutoğlu (up to the point of publication in 2011 when they were PM and FM respectively). While acknowledging the ongoing internal Turkish issues, regarding Kurds, freedom of the press, etc, Kinzer reckons that Turkey is confident, democratic and totally at the heart of everything in the Middle East, with a neo-Ottoman sphere of influence, and particularly as it doesn't seem to be getting anywhere with the EU:

Europe is slamming its door in Turkey's face. Turkey, a proud country that does not react well to insults, is responding by seeking friends elsewhere.

Where, is the question. Turkey undoubtedly ploughs its own furrow. The EU-snub thing was a familiar idea to me and the distance between them seems to be growing, but not quite clear to me was Turkey's fairly overt interest in Mosul, now an ISIS stronghold but formerly the centre of an Ottoman Vilayet and the particular focus of Turkish economic colonisation of northern Iraq over the past decade or so. Kinzer concludes that Turkey is best placed to be America's ally and indeed agent in the Middle East, propping up Americans where 'they lack some of the historical and cultural tools necessary to navigate effectively.' (Duh.) But things are not that simple, or so it seems now at least; and as Kinzer points out Turkey's diplomatic class (and experience) is limited and not fully on message. Yesterday (7 Nov) for instance Erdoğan and (worse) Davutoğlu were both sounding off at Israel about the al-Aqsa mosque and the Turkish obligation to protect Jerusalem as entrusted to them by the Caliph and the Ottomans. Turkey has always been a mystery, which just gets deeper for me every day.

Meanwhile the Iranian sections are also good - the rise of the Pahlavi shahs, the US-scuppered Mossadegh democracy, the 1979 revolution and onward, with plenty of colour and anecdote. His conclusion, though, that Iran is at heart a democratic country, isn't quite proven; the early (1906) revolutions, Mossadegh before he was sabotaged by Kermit Roosevelt, demonstrations in 2009.... is that enough?

So he contends that the US should rely on Turkey, support revolution in Iran, step away from Saudi and let it make its own much-need reform (and he's interestingly scathing about the deal struck between the hardline Wahhabis and the loose-living Saudi princes), and most boldly, step in and impose peace between Israel and Palestine. Just impose it. Just like that. He tempers this, and the other recommendations, with caveats about how this group and that and the American people are unlikely to accept all of this and therefore just nudging policy in this direction would be something. It seems that the EU has no further role to play, incidentally.

Kinzer is obviously very well informed. I can't quite accept his proposals either, at least not in the light of all that happened in 2014, but I recommend his concise and readable background to the issues.

[Thomas Ray]

The author's thesis, that the U.S. should ally with democracies, misses the point. The U.S. doesn't give a fig about democracy. The U.S. /says/ it wants democracy. It is a /lie/. The U.S. has overthrown many governments that represented and worked for their people, to set up brutal, kleptocratic dictatorships that represent, and work for, U.S. corporate hegemony.

[Onur · Rating 4 out of 5]

İran, Türkiye, Suudi Arabistan ve Amerika ekseninde Ortadoğu'ya genel bir bakış.
İran’ın Baskerville ile başlayan Demokrasi mücadelesi ve devamı.
Türkiye Cumhuriyet öncesi ve sonrası tarihi detaylar.
Atatürk ve Kurtuluş savaşı yılları.
Britanya’nın İran şahına olan desteği.
Roosevelt ve İbni Suudi’nin ortaklaşa anlaşması.
Amerikan desteği ile İsrail’in kuruluşu.
Suudi Arabistan'ın bölgede silahlanması.

Kitap tarihi güzel bilgiler mevcut.

[Arya Tabaie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published only 7 years ago (as of mid 2017), it is already outdated because of missing historical events, such as the rise of the Erdogan dictatorship, Rouhani and the nuclear deal, the Arab spring and its relative failure (which at least undermines the author's claim as to the nonexistence of a desire for democracy among Arabs), its insufficient cursory mention of the Green movement and finally, having missed the refugee crisis and the rise of right wing extremism in the West.

It is still a pleasant read, especially the length coverage given to the story of the two great dictator reformers, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Reza Shah Pahlavi.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinzer looks at the actual similarities in values and institutions between nations, and sees beyond past alliances of convenience or inherited prejudices. He examines the potential of friendship between nations previously divided more by verbal rhetoric than by any actually conflicting goals. I think it's a vision that will come: real friendship between Turkey and Iran.

[Robert Delikat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reset offered a new way for me to look at the Middle East. The book makes an argument that partnering with Turkey and Iran makes the most sense for helping to achieve a peaceful solution to the challenges in that area. Stephen Kinzer suggests that we also revisit and reshape our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Israel. The premise of all of this is based on the history of Turkey and Iran and the connections and progressive nature of their peoples to the notions of popular uprisings, gender-equality and the lust for a democratic form of government.

The biggest part of the book is an historical rendition. While I thoroughly enjoyed that I do not know how correct or unbiased it might have been. It does not really matter. Peace in that part of the world is obviously of paramount importance. Actually, peace in every part of the world is of paramount importance and whatever crazy and speculative scheme that might pull that off works for me.

The book was well-written and engaging. It pretty well sums up how things got to be the way they are in the Middle East. Whether leaders of the world are bold enough to attempt a radical paradigm shift to bring about peace is... well something we can all at least hope for. What we’ve done for the last half century certainly isn’t working.

I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of that part of the world or maybe just for anyone interested in the world in general.

[timv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice unvarnished 20th-century history of Turkey and Iran. Then there's chapters on post World War II history of Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States. He paints a picture of the United States foreign-policy and how interdependent the United states was/is with Israel and then Saudi Arabia. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from these chapters. I found the final chapters on future United States foreign-policy to be convoluted and not interesting.

Pretty easy and entertaining read, though.

[Valerie · Rating 1 out of 5]

To say Kinzer is mistaken in his assessment of Turkey's ruling party would have been putting it mildly when this book came out in 2010. At this point (2015), it reads as less credible and more delusional than, say, Dennis Rodman's assessment of Kim Jong Un. This book should either be updated and reissued or viewed as a sad artifact of how thoroughly and blindly some western journalists and pundits fell for the ruling party's lies during their first decade-ish of misrule.

[Adam Balshan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars [International Studies]
Writing: 3.5, Use: 3, Truth 3.

Seemed at first to be an above average thesis. After stating his thesis briefly at the beginning, Kinzer proceeds to give a short political history of Turkey and Iran as it pertains to their striving toward Democracy. The writing is rather impressive. Usually a work of this attitude is filled with noticeable anti-establishment buzzwords and phrases. However, Kinzer either does not hold these beliefs or is careful not to use these words that betray an uncritical liberalism or anti-establishment, anti-status quo foreign policy.

By the time he recounts the Mossadegh overthrow in 1953, one is beginning to wonder how America could have been so stupid. Rather, that doesn’t happen until he recounts the post-9/11 thawing actions of Iran, which were suddenly squelched with George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil comment. At the time I was a conservative and had not yet come to grips with W.’s fiscal liberalism, but his remark seemed to be reasonable due to the Islamic regime in Iran, its agitating, and its backing of terrorism abroad. However, this book puts in a timeline which makes it seem extremely foolish.

The history of Turkey and Iran on their acquisition, and later, their fights for, Democracy, in the face of external and internal forces is an amazing history, especially for the American who knows little about either country, and it presents a compelling case that Turkey and Iran are two of the better friends that America could hope for in Western Asia.

The history of Israeli arms support to Guatemala and El Salvador was something I had never heard. In Guatemala, the book reports that 180,000 largely unarmed peasants were liquidated as part of a supposed anti-Communist purge. One might need to investigate the other side of this equation to see if it was that simple.

When Kinzey starts getting down to brass tacks as to what the U.S. should do, his solutions are not quite as strong as I thought they could be. First, he talks about the House of Bush and the House of Saud as given in a book by Craig Unger. Then, he gives as one of his first examples a misconception, when W. held the king of Saudi Arabia’s hand when he came to Texas, this did not, as Kinzer supposed, show some especially intimate relationship. This is a common act in the Middle East. Common friends—i.e., friends are always more than common in the ME—all hold hands. So for Kinzey to not understand this ME custom and to ascribe this special meaning to it when there was none, didn’t bode well for his understanding of the culture.

To foreign policy, he was fair about not cutting ties with Saudi and Israel for many good reasons, he then unfortunately went on to be vague about U.S. mistakes in the Cold War, giving no specific examples.

“Land for Peace” was offered as the common sense solution for the I-P question. More than naïve, it is patently false. Israel has done this, and they did not get peace. 98% of ’67 borders rejected.

The “de-coupled” alliance with Turkey, however, did seem sound.

In the end, the political histories of Turkey and Iran, as well as the forming of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, was interesting. However, Kinzer’s foreign policy recommendations were perhaps simplistic, if not reasonable. Recommended to those interested in foreign policy, or to the American who has an unexamined bias towards the Middle East.

[Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this book provided good insight to the context of the international realm, but also spent a good deal of time on Israel and Saudi Arabia, which I’m not upset about, but probably should be advertised in a more holistic view of the Middle East.

This book loses one star because I believe the author egregiously omits the fact that Iran uses terrorism as an extension of its foreign policy, not just for fear-mongering. This is only mentioned with one sentence near then end of the book by mentioning Hezbollah and Hamas, but does not encapsulate Iran’s full activities in Lebanon, Syria (through Assad’s father).

Additionally, he omits the fact that Iran had begun a nuclear program through US supporting the Shah, which was suspended during the Revolution, and then started back about 15 years later only after intense internal dialogue amongst the mullahs on the grounds of morality, not in reaction to the Iraq/Iran War, which may have played a part for sure.

I wish the author would have spent more time on these two items, as I believe they are incredibly important and would likely change his thought process, as well as others reading.

[Corey Keast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another solid book

Stephen knocks it out of the park again and again. Worthy of your time and consideration. Have never disliked a Stephen Kinzer book. This book takes on specific countries such as Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabian and their relation to the USA.

[Ajay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peace and democracy in the Middle East have been the stated goals of Western leaders for generations, yet the US, the UK, and their closest regional partners have been entangled in or behind nearly every war in the area over the last century. How did Western foreign policy get everything so radically wrong? In Reset Middle East, veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer explores history to launch a controversial argument. He claims Washington has blindly hitched itself to the wrong regional allies while isolating the very nations that could bring long-term stability, leaving American strategy trapped in a stagnant, Cold War mindset.

I hadn't fully appreciated the parallels in how Turkey and Iran encountered modernity before reading this book. Both are the nation-state successors of ancient dynasties (Ottoman Empire, Qajar Persia) whose vast empires once stretched across the Middle East and beyond. Both spent the nineteenth century squeezed between Russian aggression to their north and British ambition to their south, losing territory and leverage with each passing decade. Both retained a fragile sovereignty propped up by foreign loans, advisors, and concessions. And both, faced with the prospect of decline and domination, produced a revolutionary generation (or two) that tried to drag the old order into the modern world by force. You can trace all of this just by watching the hats. In 1829, the Ottoman Empire replaced the centuries-old turban with the fez as the visual icon of the coming era of reform (Tanzimat). In 1925, Atatürk banned the fez in turn, legally requiring the switch to European-style brimmed hats. Reza Shah Pahlavi followed his lead within a few years, introducing the Pahlavi hat and embracing the fedora. The heart of Kinzer's thesis relies on the parallel histories of these two dictator-reformers, Atatürk and Reza Pahlavi, who built secular, modern societies atop ancient empires. Yet their differences explain why democracy took root in Turkey, but has remained elusive in Iran.

Atatürk and Reza were both career military officers who rose through crumbling imperial armies and seized power in the chaos that followed the First World War. Atatürk, who made his name defending Gallipoli, seized power by leading Turkey's war of independence against occupying Greek, French, and British forces. Persia had declared neutrality, but the war still brought British and Russian troops onto its soil. By 1920 the Russians had withdrawn, leaving the British General Ironside in effective control of the country. Ironside took note of Reza, describing him as a towering, imposing, highly disciplined figure, and backed his Cossack Brigade's march into Tehran in 1921 with money, arms, and ammunition. That early difference, a nationalist hero on one side with a mandate for change vs. the usurper backed by a foreign power on the other sets up a sharp contrast between two leaders whose reigns would both be defined by top-down modernization and secular reform.

The divergence widens after their deaths. When Atatürk died in 1938, power didn't pass to his family. It passed to İsmet İnönü, his top general, prime minister, and longtime political partner. Because İnönü's legitimacy came from his service to the state and his standing within the Republican People's Party, Turkish authority became anchored to institutions rather than a bloodline. İnönü's legacy was the transition to multi-party democracy and the 1950 election where he peacefully transferred power to the opposition. The military saw itself as the guardian of Atatürk's secular vision and intervened in 1960, 1971, and 1980, but each time it handed power back to civilians once order was restored. For Kinzer, Turkey sits at the center of the region's future, driven by a neo-Ottoman sphere of influence that has grown more pronounced as the West pushes it away. As he notes, Europe is slamming its door in Turkey's face, and Turkey, a proud country that does not react well to insults, is responding by seeking friends elsewhere.

Iran, in Kinzer's telling, actually had the more organic democratic tradition of the two. Shia theology viewed monarchs as inherently flawed. Unlike the Christian West's divine right of kings, or China's mandate of heaven, there was a centuries-old ideological foundation in Iran for criticizing, opposing, and limiting the power of a ruler. Everyday Iranians often gathered to debate, voice grievances, and organize in popular assemblies and local councils. It was these deeply ingrained traditions of consultation and checks on power that resonated with Iranians when they admired the young United States system of government. The alliance of the Bazaaris and Clergy had a history of protesting against state corruption and foreign exploitation, notably in the 1891 Tobacco Protest. Kinzer highlights the shared ideals of Iran and the US through Howard Baskerville, an American teacher in Tabriz who joined Iran's constitutionalists during the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and died fighting for their cause, an American martyr for Iranian freedom. All of this sets up the tragedy of 1953, when the US and UK orchestrated a coup against Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, for nationalizing his own country's oil. By crushing Iran's secular democracy, the West blocked democratic evolution, leaving political Islam as the only remaining vehicle through which Iranians could reclaim their sovereignty.

To elevate Turkey and Iran, Kinzer argues we must transition away from old alliances, starting with Saudi Arabia. Kinzer starts the story in 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz aboard a warship in the Suez Canal and traded American protection for access to Saudi oil. Kinzer largely bypasses the soft power ties that forged early relationships between America and the Arab world, choosing instead to focus on the deep contradiction at the heart of modern Saudi power. To hold power at home, the Saudi royal family relies on the loyalty of a Wahhabi religious establishment that regards Western influence as corrosive to Islam. To keep that loyalty, the monarchy has spent decades allowing, and at times directly funding, the export of fundamentalist Islam abroad, through mosques, schools, and clerics scattered across the Muslim world. Washington, meanwhile, has spent those same decades pretending not to notice that an ally has been fertilizing the ideological soil that produced al-Qaeda. Rather than suggesting a total break, Kinzer argues that the U.S. must loosen these ties, forcing the kingdom to finally confront its internal contradictions and evolve.

American backing for Israel didn't start as the blank check it later became, and Kinzer is careful to trace how we got here. In the years right after the Holocaust, American sympathy for a Jewish homeland was real but far from a strategic commitment, and when war broke out in 1948, Israel's decisive edge came not from Washington but from the Eastern Bloc, through Czechoslovak arms shipments, approved by Stalin, that helped a barely-formed state defeat the Arab armies. Israel remained far from an unconditional American partner even eight years later. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Israel joined Britain and France in attacking Egypt, Eisenhower would force them to withdraw, threatening Britain's currency and cutting off Israel's economic support until its troops left the Sinai. It's the kind of pressure that would be almost unthinkable to apply to Israel today, and the gap between that world and this one is largely the story Kinzer wants to tell. That story turns in 1967. Israel's rout of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in six days did more than redraw the map; it convinced Washington that Israel wasn't a liability but the region's dominant military power, and one who would become a key ally in the Cold War.

Kinzer draws on his investigative journalism background to expand the story beyond the Middle East and expose Israel's historical role as a sub-contractor for the American security state. Throughout the 1980s, when Congress blocked the Reagan administration from directly arming right-wing governments and counter-revolutionary forces across Central America, Israel filled the gap, supplying weapons, intelligence, and training to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Kinzer puts the death toll from Guatemala's civil war at roughly 200,000, 80% of them were civilians. Most infamous was the Iran-Contra affair, where Reagan approved a deal for Israel to secretly sell American missiles to Iran in order to release hostages held by Hezbollah and fund the Nicaraguan Contras. Israel's usefulness here, as the deniable hand that let American presidents bypass their own Congress, is what Kinzer says earned it a protected status inside Washington's defense establishment that has outlasted the Cold War. By his account, the Soviet collapse in 1991 should have ended the arrangement. Instead, the War on Terror gave it new life, reorienting the alliance against Al Qaeda, Iraq, and now Iran.

Yet, the alliance with Israel comes at a deep cost to America's values and reputation. Kinzer tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head-on, viewing it as a primary engine of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world. Rather than accepting the conflict as an intractable religious stalemate, Kinzer firmly asserts that the absence of a two-state solution is the United States' greatest foreign policy failure of the 21st-century. While a window of opportunity to broker peace existed during the Oslo process, it slipped away largely because Washington failed to hold Israel's right wing to the terms both sides had already tentatively accepted. America's unconditional diplomatic shield, most visible in its repeated vetoes protecting Israel at the UN, has let Israel keep expanding settlements in the West Bank. Kinzer's conclusion is that the status quo fails everyone: denying Palestinians self-determination and human rights, trapping Israel in a permanent occupation incompatible with democracy, and dragging down America's credibility. Kinzer's recommendation here isn't to abandon Israel. It's closer to an intervention to save Israel from itself. His proposed fix is deliberately blunt: an imposed peace, with the United States using the full weight of its financial and diplomatic leverage.

Kinzer’s regional calculus hinges on the assumption that the Arab world lacks the civic foundations for democracy, a premise that was challenged almost immediately after his book's publication with the outbreak of the Arab Spring. This sudden wave of democratic aspiration was unforeseen by Kinzer, whose thesis is built on 20th-century historical patterns and fails to predict 21st-century realities. Kinzer argued that distancing Washington from Riyadh would force the monarchy to confront its internal contradictions and evolve. Instead, reducing American influence simply invited competing superpowers to fill the void. This became clear when China, not the United States, brokered the historic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran, momentarily cooling a bitter Sunni-Shia cold war that Kinzer failed to foresee, which had spent over a decade tearing through proxies in Syria and Yemen. Most damaging to Kinzer's thesis, however, is the trajectory of Turkey. Rather than serving as the reliable secular democratic anchor he envisioned, Turkey under Tayyip Erdogan has moved toward authoritarianism. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, Erdogan has dismantled secular institutions and allies himself with Islamic nationalism. Looking back from the vantage point of 2026, the events of the last fifteen years have deeply challenged Kinzer’s core thesis, making it highly unlikely he would offer the same advice today.

Kinzer’s warnings regarding the cost of an unconditional alliance with Israel proved more insightful, even if the trajectory of the conflict evolved in ways he did not anticipate. Where Kinzer saw the revival of the Oslo Accords as the only path forward, the subsequent decade saw Israel and the United States attempt a radical alternative through the Abraham Accords. Bypassing the Palestinian issue entirely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s successive governments normalized diplomatic ties with regional Arab states while simultaneously accelerating settlement expansion in the West Bank. This strategy relied on a doctrine of permanent containment: a cycle of periodic military suppression crudely referred to in Israeli defense circles as "mowing the lawn." It was built on the flawed conviction that overwhelming military superiority could indefinitely bottle up and manage Palestinian aspirations. But this has not led to peace; the tragedy of the October 7th attack and subsequent genocide in Gaza have plunged the region into unending chaos, demonstrating exactly why disentangling American foreign policy from the unchecked ambitions of its ally has become a matter of urgent national interest.

While many of Kinzer’s predictions have faltered, his assessment of Iran has proven far more resilient. He wrote in detail about the critical moment in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq, when Iran's reformist president Khatami drafted a sweeping two-page proposal known as the "Grand Bargain". Sent secretly to Washington via the Swiss, it offered staggering concessions: full transparency and international access to Iran's nuclear program, cooperation in stabilizing a democratic Iraq, ending material support to Hezbollah and Hamas, and acceptance of a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But Washington was flush with what looked at the time like a swift, triumphant victory in Baghdad. VP Dick Cheney declared "we don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it," and the administration doubled down on the "Axis of Evil" framing that lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. By the time the situation in Iraq became a quagmire, the political tide in Tehran had turned; the reformists were out, replaced by hardliners with zero interest in diplomacy. Kinzer describes this tragic cycle well, noting that "whenever one has seemed ready to compromise, the other was in too militant a mood to compromise." In 2015, the JCPOA briefly demonstrated what Kinzer’s vision of engagement could look like in practice, offering a glimpse of a normalized diplomatic path. More importantly, successive waves of civil protest, including the 2009 Green Movement and the 2022 Woman, Life, and Freedom protests, have demonstrated that the desire for accountability and secular governance remains vibrant beneath the surface of the autocracy. Had American leaders continued on the path of diplomacy (uplifting the pro-Western middle class, empowering doves, moderates, and progressives, and integrating Iran into the global system) a peaceful transition to democracy, liberty, and greater regional stability might have been within reach.

Instead, 2016 brought a new American president who would withdraw from the JCPOA and launch a "Maximum Pressure" campaign that culminated in the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani. The historical irony, which directly supports Kinzer's warnings, is that economic sanctions actually empower the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) rather than weaken it. Decades of reporting have demonstrated that by driving the formal economy underground, sanctions granted the IRGC a lucrative monopoly over smuggling networks and black-market trade. In short, sanctions enrich the hardliners and impoverish the very middle class that shares ideals with the West. With sanctions failing and escalating tensions between Israel and Iran over Gaza, Hamas, and Hezbollah, Trump's second term could have been the opportunity to change course. Instead, reckless strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities in 2025 and the launch of open war in 2026 have set global peace and prosperity back a generation. While Operation Epic Fury scored an initial victory in decapitating the regime’s senior leadership, the resulting regional war has left thousands dead, destabilized the region, and risked a global economic crisis. America's reputation will be permanently tainted by the choices it has made this decade: pulling out of the JCPOA, preferring economic coercion to diplomacy, and launching a war of aggression. Beyond exposing Washington's impotence and poor leadership on the world stage, this war has shattered age-old assumptions: that alliance with America guarantees security and that America has the moral character and military strength to police the world. This ruinous outcome underscores the tragedy of ignoring Kinzer's insight that Iran is a power that the West simply cannot ignore and is undoubtedly better as an ally than an enemy.

Ultimately, the greatest strength of Reset lies in Kinzer’s engaging, character-driven journalistic style, which transforms a century of geopolitics into a gripping narrative. He is a master storyteller, and his ability to draw vivid historical lines makes this book an enjoyable and timely read. However, Kinzer’s heavy reliance on 20th-century history caused him to make incorrect assumptions, and his preference for sweeping, overly simple solutions, such as an "imposed peace" to the Israel-Palestine conflict, has proven to be inadequate to guide us in making 21st-century policy. The chaos and conflict of the region over the last fifteen years proves that our Middle East alliances cannot be so simply reordered like pieces on a chessboard. Even so, Reset earns its place on my reading list for making a complex history approachable and criticizing the stagnant Cold War mindset that continues to dominate Washington’s defense establishment.

[Brumaire Bodbyl-Mast · Rating 2 out of 5]

Coming off the high of Kinzer’s biography of the Dulles brothers, this book here left a terrible taste in my mouth. Unflinchingly a foreign policy recommendation to the American Empire, written à la some great eunuch Visier. Kinzer’s argument postulates that the US should pivot away from Saudi Arabia and the Zionist Entity, and towards Türkiye and Iran. Don’t worry, the reasoning why is even more baffling. In the style of argumentation so common among those outside of the historic discipline, who wield history in their verbal battles, Kinzer her assumes that because a nation has had a “democratic” tradition, at some point in history, this makes the nation naturally prone towards democracy. Now, the two choices he picks here are somewhat baffling in this regard, and even as he recounts their respective modern histories throughout the text (something which dominates over 50% of the book) they hardly support his argumentation. Türkiye’s European modes were imposed from above by Ataturk, who left the state he built in the care of the military, who never tolerated a truly democratic election for over a half century. When they did, the candidate was well vetted, and eventually we wound up with the virtual dictatorship of Erdoğan, who Kinzer has crowned with laurels. (The book was written in 2009.) Iran had the constitutional revolt, yes, but many countries in West Asia and North Africa have had plenty of attempts at liberal revolution. It’s not necessarily unique to Iran. Not to mention, Kinzer makes a great heap of sweeping generalizations and assumptions — such as the thought that “Iran has the most pro-American population out of any Muslim country.” His reasoning for the pivot away from Saudi Arabia is fine enough, but from an American perspective, the pivot away from the Zionist entity is basically impossible. As well, he has to open the book with ten trillion caveats that the security of the Zionist project is key to the security of the region blah blah blah. It’s a crock of shit being dumped in the already fetid sewer. The book reeks of anti-Arab bigotry, seeing as the author picks two of the region’s non Arab states to be the future regional players in his action figure world.

[Ramil Kazımov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bu kitabı tam olarak bir dakika önce bitirdim.. Tam bir günde ! Bunu övünmek için söylemiyorum, amacım kitabın ne kadar okunaklı olduğunu (tabii çevirmen elinden gelenin en iyisini yapmıştır) ve de ne kadar öğretme hevesi yarattığını söylemektir.

İlk olarak, kitap bir roman tadında yazılmıştır diyebilirim. Kitap Orta Doğunun iki ülkesi - Türkiye ve İran - hakkında geniş bilgi birikimi edinmenizi sağlıyor. Bu iki ülkenin Orta Doğuda demokrasiyi en eski tatmış olan ülkeler olduğunu görüyoruz. Türkler için demokrasi Türkiye Cümhuriyyetinin kurulması ile başladı desem, yalan söylemiş olarım. Demokrasiye doğru reformlar ta On Dokuzuncu yüzyılda (1837 Gülhane Hattı Şerifi) başladı, 1876-da ilk anayasa kabul edildi ve 1909-da anayasa yeniden iade edildi. İranda da tam olarak Türkiye ile aynı zamanda - 1906 - ilk anayasa kabul edildi.

İkinci olarak, bu iki ülkenin iki büyük önderi - İranda Şah Rza Pehlevi, Türkiyede ise Mustafa Kemal Paşa Atatürk - 20. yüzyılın ilk yarısına damğasını vurdu. Bu şahıslar adı çekilen ülkeler için o kadar önemli bir rol oynadı ki, bu ülkelerin gelişmesinin temelini oluşturdular. Yüzyılın ikinci yarısı Türkiye için askeri darbeler ve Turgut Özal, İran içinse İslam Devrimi ile akıllarda kaldı. Demokrasi yazara göre Türkiyede İrandan daha sağlam temellere sahip. Bunu güzelce anlatıyor tabii.

Üçüncü olarak, yeni (21.) yüzyılda Türkiye ve İranın ABD için oldukça önemli bir müttefik ola bileceğini (Türkiye zaten bir müttefik) söylüyor. İranla ABD geriliminin köklerinin 1953-te Ajax Operasyonu ile görevinden alınmış Muhammed Musaddık ve görevine iade edilmiş Şah Muhammed Rza Pehlevi (Şah Rza Pehlevinin oğlu) olayına, kısaca İranda gerçek demokrasinin bir Amerikan (ilk CİA) darbesine kadar uzandığını öğrenmiş oluyoruz. Yazar her iki ülkeye de gayet sıcak yaklaşıyor ve ABD politikasının bu iki ülkeye karşı değişmesi gerektiğini, onlara daha çok serbestlik alanı vermesini savunuyor. Bir gazeteci olan Stephen Kinzer gayet güzel bir iş yapmış açıkçası))

[Robert Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun and informative, but strangely unsatisfying. Not sure what it was exactly. Kinzer has a thesis to push, and it is one that I strongly agree with. Iran is a much more natural partner for the United States than our current "allies" in Saudi Arabia. This book provides brief histories of Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and their relationships with the United States. I learned a bit, and Kinzer's time as a foreign correspondent has left him with a deep knowledge of all these countries. It's a good short book for anyone who wants a brief account of how we got into the mess we are in.

I think the problem here is with me. My taste tends towards deeper dives into the histories of single countries. I like books I can also use to hold doors open, and this ain't that. Kinzer has a great sense for telling anecdotes, and tells a great story. It could almost make a good movie. A great intro, but not really for me.

One further note. The bits on Turkey are woefully out of date. What he says remains true, Turkey is a great partner for the US, but his rosy picture of President Erdogan needs some serious revision. This is not Kinzer's fault. In 2009, when the book was written, it was easy to be a big Erdogan fan. His struggle against the Turkish military was a worthwhile one. Now that Erdogan has won that struggle, however, a different and more disturbing picture has emerged.

So yeah, if you don't know anything about US policy in the Middle East, this is a great place to start. If you're more familiar with the history and the countries in question, you might find it kind of frustrating. It's not wrong, it's just short.

[Sanchari]

What a wild ride.


Unstarred because of my inherent suspicion of people who offer direct commentary on how things "should" be. The idea is to come back after reading more, about all the sides of this multifaceted coin, and then read this book again.

The book delivers on what it promised to do: "it summons the logic of history to address the future." Kinzer explores Iran and Turkey - two countries where the US foreign policy ought to be focused on, and Saudi Arabia and Israel - where too much attention by the US has accomplished the opposite of what is aspired.

The four countries and the US are like the nodal points on the world map, where the string connecting them all - emerging from the US - ties eventually the rest of the entire world. As one of my professors in college once said: one should understand the "nose" of a subject and focus on it - pulling the nose brings you the entire body.

This is the nose.

I read this book after "All the Shah's Men", that delved into modern Iranian history in beautiful depth and detail. Meant to be so perhaps, as where Shah's Men fizzled out by the time Mohammad Reza Shah came to power after the 1953 coup d'etat, Reset builds strongly on the evolution of Iran under him, leading to Khomeini and beyond.

Once again, as in Shah's Men, the art of diplomacy is Kinzer's forte - more prominent in this book as he articulates on how it (the US policy in particular) needs to reinvent itself in the modern, post cold war context.


Marked for reread.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bottom line, we (the US) needs to reshape our foreign policy in the Mideast. Out of the two countries in the Mideast that are populated with people yearning for a democracy, one we declared a part of the Axis of Evil (Iran) and the other (Turkey) we have pretty much forgotten about since "winning" the Cold War. The author takes you through the histories of both countries, on their rode to democracy, and the events that occurred stopping one (Iran) and slowing the other (Turkey). Both countries are rich in history, and are "attached" to American principles in many ways. We need to take advantage of this. Great book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in our relations with these two countries, and the possibilities that can happen if we quit "shooting ourselves in the foot".

[Aykut · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. It was the occasion for me to know more about the history of Iran, saudi arabia and israel.
I was more aware of turkey's history, cause i am turkish.
The book was really interesting in the first parts, but i wasn't really convinced by the last parts..

Now that i have a global vision of the situation, i'm gonna read other books which focus on each country..
I'll be starting with Iran.

[Glenn Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Kinzer clearly has passion for Turkey and the Middle East. I greatly enjoyed this book as the passion makes it worthy to read and I learned a great deal about Turkey and Iran. The book ventures off to Israel and the PLO which I felt was taking away fromthe title, however, he pulled it all back to tie it in on how Turkey and Iran are handling their affairs and how Israel fits in with America and these two countries. Wonderful book and well worth the time to read.

[Glen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like for this book to be in every household in the U.S. I think it is the best book written regarding foreign policy. What a pity the 2000 presidential election didn't go the other way. The only currency the United States has to spend is it's good will and example. President Obama has the intelligence to use that currency if the country would support him

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first two-thirds of the book were pretty great, but the theme of Kinzer's book - that Turkey will be a secular light for the Middle East to follow - has been pretty much dashed since Erdogan has made his end-run away from it. Saudi Arabia and Israel also feature prominently in the last third of the book, which feels as though it was made to pad the book.

[Nell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting time to read the history of U.S. and other Western diplomatic missteps in the Middle East. Let's hope that this time we don't screw up the opportunities afforded us during the current realignment.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is any "good" consequence about early 21st century world terrorism, it is that it's captured my attention and focused my neglected interest in middle world history. I like this book's description of early 20th century events a lot and intend to seek out the author's other books.

[Laverne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked this book a lot. For a long time I have felt so uninformed regarding the Middle East. This book gave me a lot of history and helped fill in political and religious information. Would really recommend.

[Kit Pravda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative. Applicable to current mid-east news.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very worthwhile look at geopolitics from a different perspective.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't believe anyone can be so naive....history wise well done. but his own thoughts? the easter bunny comes to mind.

[Mostafa Bushehri · Rating 4 out of 5]

نگاه بسیار واقع‌گرایانه توام با ذکر تاریخ و همینطور آگاهی گسترده و شناخت خوبِ نویسنده از منطقه خاورمیانه کتاب رو در زمره کتاب‌های مفید و خواندنی قرار میده.

[Christian Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much needed solution to American policy in the Middle East and a very viable way forward!