Why are America’s oldest Middle East partnerships — Saudi Arabia and Israel — still standing, and what would replace them? Kinzer’s answer is heresy told as history: the natural allies for the twenty-first century are Turkey and Iran, the only two Muslim powers in the region with a century of democratic struggle in their bones.…

In the 110 years between Hawaii in 1893 and Iraq in 2003, the United States deliberately deposed fourteen foreign governments. Kinzer tells them as one continuum, not fourteen accidents: open imperial seizures, then Cold War covert coups, then invasions — the method changing with the constraints, the impulse never. Nearly every operation achieved its aim,…