An unprecedented analysis of the crucial but underexplored roles the United States and other nations have played in shaping Syria's ongoing civil war"One of the best informed and non-partisan accounts of the Syrian tragedy yet published."-Patrick Cockburn, Independent Syria's brutal, long-lasting civil war is widely viewed as a domestic contest that began in 2011 and only later drew foreign nations into the fray. But in this book Christopher Phillips shows the crucial roles that were played b...

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review “A powerful, and in many [ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . .

An important critique of visionary state planning.”—Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times...