When Philip Gordon arrived at the White House to be Barack Obama’s top Middle East hand in 2013, he advocated arming Syrian opposition forces as part of a grand strategy to topple Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad.
But he soon had second thoughts. Just months after joining Obama’s national security team, he decided the White House’s hopes of a moderate opposition prevailing were doomed. He later described himself as one of the first to “buck the trend” on efforts to change the regime.
Gordon’s time as Obama’s top Middle East policymaker — a job he assumed after decades spent as one of Washington’s foremost experts on Europe — offered a crash course in the limits of American power.
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