This is a book that could be summed up in a sentence without doing the author injustice: foreign policy is domestic politics. It is a deceptively simple argument, the originality of which rests in the way in which Ewan Stein builds it by offering further nuance to both foreign policy analysis (FPA) and Middle East Studies (MES) research on regional dis/order. Let me discuss, in turn, the book’s contributions to these two bodies of scholarship.

Middle East Studies is where Stein situates his book. Where MES scholarship falters, the author argues, is when considering the role that domestic politics plays in shaping foreign policy; that is, without recourse to familiar tropes such as the Arab street. Stein builds his argument by drawing on tools borrowed from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to discuss the role that ideology plays in shaping state–society relations within and beyond boundaries. Ideology, as Stein understands it, does not merely play a legitimating role but also a constitutive one in rendering state–society relations more robust even as the state fails to deliver the services much needed by society.

Here, the author offers one of the two key concepts of the study—"ideological externalization”—which is understood as the ways in which regional regimes subcontract or outsource their ideals to nonstate actors to maintain the illusion of their being a trustworthy ally that they have carefully cultivated with their great power allies. This could take, for example, the form of the Saudi regime literally exporting its own extremists to Afghanistan while projecting itself as playing a moderating role in the Arabian Peninsula. The reason why regional regimes have resorted to outsourcing the fulfilment of their ideals to nonstate actors, Stein argues, is because they have sought two things that are not entirely compatible: they need societal elements to feel that the fulfilment of their ideals are not put on the back burner, but they also need the great powers to view them as trustworthy local allies that are able to prioritize and further great power interests, be it defense against the Soviet Union or holding in check regional challengers (such as Iran after 1979).

This is where the author offers the book’s second key concept—"competitive support-seeking”—which is about the ways in which regional leaders engage in foreign policy maneuvering to garner material support that is much needed for their domestic political projects. Such maneuvering involved playing great powers against each other throughout the Cold War and beyond. For the non–oil-rich states, it has involved pandering to the regime security needs of Saudi leaders with the aim of receiving financial and other aid. Stein’s argument is that much of regional foreign policy can be understood as attempts to prevail on their peers in making themselves useful to great powers’ interests.

Ideological externalization, then, was deemed necessary by regional actors insofar as the ideological dimension that glued the state and society together was something that the regime did not want to be seen as being directly fulfilled, in case their great/regional power backers were disillusioned and went in search for new allies, which would cause their competitive support-seeking to fail. For example, Gamal Abdel Nasser was able to continue to claim ownership of Arabist and egalitarian ideals by subcontracting action to nonstate actors at home and abroad while offering Egypt to the United States as a trustworthy ally. More recently, Turkey’s policy makers subcontracted Islamist ideals to nonstate actors throughout the region while portraying Turkey as a potential dealmaker that could be trusted by both the United States and Israel.

Here is the novelty of the argument: although the domestic drivers of foreign policy are well understood in MES, more often than not societal actors are viewed as limiting the choices of foreign policy leadership. Stein, in contrast, presents domestic factors as constitutive. Here is the bold claim of the book that challenges much of the MES literature: “regional ‘master conflicts’…have often been epiphenomenal. To the extent they have been ‘about’ something, these antagonisms have reflected the hegemonic strategies of exclusionary and authoritarian states” (p. 220). Those hegemonic strategies, in turn, have been about prevailing on domestic rivals at home to render state–society relations cohesive and beating off regional rivals abroad. Indeed, Stein does not locate the sources of Middle East dis/order in primordial differences, whether ethnic or sectarian. He also does not locate the sources of such dis/order in great power manipulation alone. Stein’s fresh and insightful analysis offers a domestic politics argument through and through.

This brings me to the book’s contribution to foreign policy analysis. It is worth underscoring that the author does not draw out the theoretical implications of his analysis of Middle East dis/order until the concluding chapter. Although the introduction highlights the limitations of FPA literature, it is in the concluding section that the theoretical implications of the book are drawn out. The role that ideology plays in shaping regional dis/order, argues Stein, is larger than recognized by FPA or international relations insofar as it is not only about making use of external allies to balance local rivals (“omnibalancing”) or diverting attention away from domestic ills (diversionary theories of action) but also creating and sustaining the relations that hold state and society together and define who “we” are in world politics. This is why Stein views ideology as constitutive and not only instrumental. As such, Stein offers what remains underanalyzed in David Campbell’s 1992 analysis of foreign policy as identity politics. Where Campbell’s Writing Security looked at the ways in which US foreign policy defined who “we” are while rendering others “foreign” (i.e., self/other relations), Stein offers an analysis that is better able to explain socioeconomic factors inside and across state boundaries. Relatedly, Stein’s book offers a crucial corrective to Michael Barnett’s Dialogues in Arab Politics (1998). Where Barnett bracketed security to focus on identity politics on the regional scale, Stein defines security in terms of state-building and regime maintenance and understands the making of regional dis/order as regional actors’ attempts to maintain domestic hegemony in socioeconomic terms.

Arguably the book’s greatest strength is also its Achilles heel. On the one hand, Stein’s focus on domestic state and nonstate actors in the making of regional dis/order is a much-needed corrective to MES and FPA scholarship. Yet, on the other hand, the ways in which regional actors have responded to an already constituted world (i.e., the international) remain underemphasized. The answers to the questions of what constitutes a proper “state,” what entails “sovereignty,” and what it means to be “modern” have already been given by the time Middle East actors enter the international arena: what they can and cannot achieve via hegemonic strategies has already been circumscribed. This is not to deemphasize the domestic politics point made by the author but to highlight that not only the domestic but also the international deserve deeper analysis by going beyond great power geopolitics to consider the international as shaping who and where “we” are in the world.