Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.
A billboard bearing a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump accompanied by a message is deployed in central Tel Aviv, Israel.A billboard bearing a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump accompanied by a message is deployed in central Tel Aviv, Israel, on June 18. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images
Following days of Israeli bombardment of Iran and missiles fired on Tel Aviv and other cities in reprisal by that country, the United States suddenly finds itself on the precipice of direct involvement in another major conflict in the Middle East.
Simply knowing the history of American warfare in that region and in countries nearby in the last generation is enough to render this surprising. The United States’ interventions in Iraq were enormously costly in both lives and treasure and left a broken country in their wake that has never fully rebounded. America’s long occupation of Afghanistan ended in abject retreat, having achieved even fewer of its goals and after exacting even higher costs.
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Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.
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