BOOK REVIEW - Bruce Riedel, Kings and Presidents. Saudi-Arabia and the United States Since FDR (Geopolitics in the 21st Century), Brookings Institution Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0815731375 Abstract: There is a growing tendency to view the Middle East through four overarching nexuses: the terrorism-repression, the tribal-modern, the geopoliticalgeoeconomic and the money-buys-everything-social alienation. Each of these, at times all of them, have been taken to explain the unfolding trends in this expansive, ill-defined region, called the Middle East. Such broad strokes also forms the bedrock decision-makers in Europe, and beyond, utilise to make sense of, and design policies for, dealing with the complexities of the Middle East. But what if international relations scholarship and decision-makers are wrong? What if the public policy networks have misunderstood and, as a result, misrepresented the Middle East and its many cross-cutting cleavages? This would imply that the very foundations of Euro-Atlantic policies towards the region are eschew. There have been some notable attempts at correcting such policy misdirection. Bruce Riedel’s book titled SaudiArabia and the United States Since FDR is one such attempt. Keywords: terrorism-repression, tribal-modern, geopolitical-geoeconomic Pages: 363-366

Belfer, Mitchell

BOOK REVIEW - Bruce Riedel, Kings and Presidents. Saudi-Arabia and the United States Since FDR (Geopolitics in the 21st Century), Brookings Institution Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0815731375 Abstract: There is a growing tendency to view the Middle East through four overarching nexuses: the terrorism-repression, the tribal-modern, the geopoliticalgeoeconomic and the money-buys-everything-social alienation. Each of these, at times all of them, have been taken to explain the unfolding trends in this expansive, ill-defined region, called the Middle East. Such broad strokes also forms the bedrock decision-makers in Europe, and beyond, utilise to make sense of, and design policies for, dealing with the complexities of the Middle East. But what if international relations scholarship and decision-makers are wrong? What if the public policy networks have misunderstood and, as a result, misrepresented the Middle East and its many cross-cutting cleavages? This would imply that the very foundations of Euro-Atlantic policies towards the region are eschew. There have been some notable attempts at correcting such policy misdirection. Bruce Riedel’s book titled SaudiArabia and the United States Since FDR is one such attempt. Keywords: terrorism-repression, tribal-modern, geopolitical-geoeconomic Pages: 363-366

Mitchell Belfer ()
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Mitchell Belfer: Euro-Gulf Information Centre, Rome, Italy; Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Terrorism and Security at the Metropolitan University Prague, Czech Republic

Eastern Journal of European Studies, 2020, vol. 11(1), 363-366

Date: 2020
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