Barry Rubin: 13 books

Beyond the political typology it embodies, Syria also provides the best case study of what has happened in the Arab world, and thus in the Middle East, during the last half-century. When it gained independence, Syria was a democratic country with a seemingly bright future. Blessed with fertile land...

Following the Victory of Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and the murder of Egypt’s President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, many studies were undertaken and published on radical Islamic fundamentalist movements in the Middle East. Given these events, that research stressed the importance of such groups,...

This book foresaw the “Arab Spring” of 2011. It was obvious years before that the old Arab nationalist dictatorships had failed and were being challenged by two forces: liberal democracy advocates and revolutionary Islamists. While the Long War for Freedom focuses on the moderates, it also, by...

Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been devoted to the history and contemporary course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The confrontation within Palestine, the participation of Great Britain, the United States, and the United Nations, and the impact of these events on Jews and Palestinian...

When I realized that nobody had written a comprehensive history of Jewish assimilation, I knew that I had to try doing it myself. It was a remarkable learning experience as I researched a wide range of cultural and historical issues and discovered lots of people and events of which I’d previously...

The evolution of dictatorship is as much a part of history as the development of democracy. In our ear persuasion has become as powerful a force as repression in creating and maintaining such regimes. Debates over the nature of these systems are at the center of the contemporary U.S. and European...

This book is a history of the State Department but, more broadly, of the American foreign policymaking process. It narrates the development of both the decision-making institutions and the content of policy from the founding of the republic through the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Few...

Cauldron of Turmoil was written as a history--that I hoped to present in an exciting narrative way--of the dramatic developments in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s and how they made this area the highest priority for U.S. foreign policy. The combination of Iran’s Islamist revolution and...

This is the story of Istanbul--but also of Turkey, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean--during World War II, based on extensive interviews and the use of archives, especially those of the OSS, which I was the first to see for this region. The book is written as a cross between a scholarly work...

I’ll confess that in some ways, The ‘Tragedy of the Middle East is my favorite of everything I’ve written. The title was chosen in great sincerity because the theme here is to explain how the region’s modern history really is a tragedy.’ Terrible mistakes were made; the wrong roads were...

Responding to a press-conference question in February, 1980 about the United States role in the 1953 return to power of the shah, President Carter replied that the events were not worth going into because they were “ancient history.” Clearly this was a tactical response—there was no sense adding...

It is a titanic story though one rather slow-moving by contemporary standards. In 79, the Temple destroyed, the Jewish rebellion crushed, the Romans enslaved thousands and deported them to Italy or southern France in order to extinguish the Jewish people forever. Yet they did not give up their religion...

When writing a book, an author often has the sensation of being surrounded by that topic. In the case of anti-Americanism that experience was particularly strong. As the 21st century began it seemed as if the amount of criticism the United States was receiving around the world was matched only by...