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The Superpowers and the Middle East is a very good book indeed. It offers an astute, yet eminently accessible overview of international relations in the Arab world during the era of the High Cold War, from 1955-67. It thus provides an almost perfect introduction to the topic for general readers and undergraduate students. The author's presentation of events is consistently even-handed and compelling, leaving no room even for the quibbles of specialists. Most impressive of all is the massive documentation, which features a wide range of contemporaneous and later Arabic-language sources.
So why does one come away from this remarkable text fundamentally dissatisfied? Perhaps the dissatisfaction arises out of a gnawing sense that the exceptional erudition displayed throughout the book leaves us little more enlightened than we were at the start. Fawaz Gerges supplements the classic, interview-based accounts of Malcolm Kerr, Patrick Seale, and Hanna Batatu with one based largely on published and archival...