The starting point for this book, which sets out a constructivist analysis of George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda (FA) and US democracy promotion in the Middle East, is the widespread and far-reaching social unrest across the region from late 2010 onwards. These upheavals led to glib claims by neocon apologists that they demonstrated the fulfilment of the Bush administration's democracy-promotion agenda, a convenient and simplistic notion that deserves a critical response. The author has certainly provided one, but the reader has to jump through several theoretical hoops to get there.

First, a short word on my perspective. As a historian I am as a rule pro-theory for how it can sharpen one's insight and offer social-scientific frameworks (and language) for explaining historical developments. As an IR scholar I am as a rule pro-constructivism, it being a kind of Gramscian analysis without the continuing reliance on economic determinism (thinking of the post-Marxism that Laclau and Mouffe were getting at back in the 1980s). So I am in general a reader sympathetic to what is being attempted here, following Marc Trachtenberg's adage that the key for international history is “to find some way to get conceptual and empirical issues to link up with each other.”Footnote ¹

The Freedom Agenda was initiated in the wake of 9/11 as the Bush administration's strategy to transform the Middle East politically, economically, and socially. This included the Forward Strategy of Freedom in the Middle East (FSFME), the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), and the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA), which collectively aimed at promoting democratic reforms and “opening up” national economies through regional economic cooperation and mutually advantageous interlinkage. These developments are tracked across the 2001–11 decade, from Bush's “conservative radicalism” (democracy promotion) to Obama's “conservative pragmatism” (democracy support) (160).

The approach adopted to analyse this is “institutional constructivism,” delving into how interests were formed, justified, and communicated as US foreign-policy objectives. Thus the Freedom Agenda is examined as a discursive “exercise of power” (51), conveniently malleable according to how US interests towards the Middle East were articulated and altered over time. The events of 9/11 were the take-off point for a narrative that presented them as a national tragedy, exposing the good/evil divide in the world and requiring a military response as the only way to enforce justice. The Freedom Agenda that came out of this appears to be as much a (self-)justification of the application of US hard power as a set of objectives in its own right. The author rightly dwells on the contradictions between an all-encompassing Global War on Terrorism, with its covert rendition networks, simultaneously being applied alongside a democracy-promotion agenda, and the lack of any real notion of how democracy actually should be promoted, leading one MEPI official to talk of “throwing spaghetti against the wall” to see what might stick (142). Towards the end of the book the critique duly heats up: the Freedom Agenda is a prime example of “imperial right” and a “new form of imperial security governance” (151–53) whereby democracy (in the form of Hamas or Hezbollah, for instance) ultimately must not challenge established US interests or influence in the Middle East.

This is a challenging book that does not treat its subject lightly. However, one does wonder by the end whether the approach adopted is as coherent or far-reaching as the author hopes it to be. To start with, the “theory chapter” that introduces institutional constructivism commendably breaks its various elements up into bite-sized chunks (structure and agency, ideas, crisis, identity, etc.) but sometimes drifts into hyperbole. Identities are thus “overwhelmingly constructed” (50), and at one point “freedom” is described both as an “ontological property of Being” and as “simply a set of universal values” in the same paragraph (67), leaving this reader wondering which philosophical path to take. There is also the constructivist subject/object dilemma: the focus is on constructing a “crisis narrative” to explain a catastrophic event, but one is left wondering whether this approach still adheres to the belief that verifiable causes of the crisis can be identified in objective reality (the author seems to think so, which left one musing on a potential contradiction). There is the unfortunate use of the abbreviation “IDF” throughout the text, which triggered the constant assumption that US foreign policy was being run by the Israeli Defence Force instead of the intended “ideological discursive formation” (5) (a confusion which, in the context of the book's subject area, is easily generated). In terms of texts, I doubt whether George W. Bush's rhetoric has ever before been so finely combed in order to discern the motivations behind US foreign-policy behaviour. No distinction seems to have been made between types of text, be they policy document or public speech (tough for the historian in me). The discursive analysis is driven by questions “what” and “how,” not really “why” or “who” (54–55). This comes out most notably with respect to the neocon issue. Acknowledging that the securitization process being described has all the markings of an “elite-led project” (52), there is a deliberate move to cast a very wide interpretation of “elite” precisely to avoid any sense of US foreign policy being taken over by some kind of conspiratorial clique. That would undermine the book's real goal of unpacking the discursive “exercise of power,” but agency still requires someone to come up with these texts for some reason. For instance, one can't help noticing the undue influence of Liz Cheney on the FA agenda (127–29, 142), and other individuals come to mind as well. It's fully understandable why the author made this move, but it does leave a small critical vacuum at the centre of the analysis.

The book rounds off well with observations on the meaning of the decade-long Freedom Agenda for US foreign policy. The uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa have exposed the fact that the Bush-like “grand narrative” has been fully discredited – in that respect Obama has been all about discretion and flexibility, and there is no longer a “single sustainable model” to be applied (147). The “IDF” that was constructed to drive US policy towards the region collapsed because it was simply too shallow when placed against the actual reality it was meant to alter. The author ends with a commendable prescription: unless the United States “creates enough space for policy innovation” it will continue to go down conservative reactionary paths doomed to failure (185). A fair statement, although after reading this book it is hard to see how US foreign policy will ever escape the dreams and delusions generated within the Washington, DC beltway – the IDF par excellence.