Departures With Robert Amsterdam

For the past 70 years, the United States has toyed with interventionism in the Middle East on numerous occasions, from  Iran to Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, among others. And yet, despite the consistently disastrous consequences of these efforts, the same policies continue to attract support, as US decision-makers consistently underestimate the costs and fail to learn the lessons of the past. Dr. Philip H. Gordon, a former diplomat and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins the podcast this week to discuss his excellent new book, "Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East." Although one can sympathize with those suffering under a brutal, tyrannical regime engaged in atrocities, there seems to be a common failure to grasp that when you remove a regime, a security vacuum is opened up where chaos thrives, which is very hard to fill. "The costs are almost always much higher than anticipated, and there are always many unintended consequen