There is no question that the Middle East is a mess. The usual explanations for the disarray, however, fail to capture the root cause. Sectarianism, popular discontent with unrepresentative governments, economic failure, and foreign interference are the usual suspects in most analyses, but they are symptoms of the regional crisis, not causes. The weakness, and in some cases collapse, of central authority in so many of the region’s states is the real source of its current disorder. The civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, along with the frail governments in Iraq, Lebanon, and the quasi state of Palestine, define the long-term geopolitical challenge of the region. These political vacuums invite the intervention of powers near and far. They allow sectarian and ethnic identities to become more salient. They give terrorist groups opportunities for growth. They impede economic development. And they create profound human suffering, which leads to massive refugee flows.

Rebuilding central government authority is the necessary first step for the region to escape its current Hobbesian nightmare. The problem is that state building has historically been a long and violent process. It is done by ruthless men (in the Middle East, always men) who have little regard for democratic niceties or international norms of human rights. Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that this kind of order creation cannot be done by outside powers. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington has proved that it is much better at destroying states than building them.

It is foolish to think that the choice in the Middle East’s weak and failed states is between good governance and bad governance, or between democracy and authoritarianism. In reality, the choice now is between harsh governance and no governance. Once order is established, there will be a chance for economic development and political progress, but no guarantee of either. For those interested in a less violent, more predictable, and even, at some point in the future, more just Middle East, the hard reality is that dealing with extremely flawed regimes, with blood on their hands, is sometimes the only way to check the dangers of disorder.

The irony of the current crisis of state weakness and collapse in the Middle East is that during the last three decades of the twentieth century, the regimes in power were becoming more stable and better able to govern their societies, for good (providing social services) and for ill (building institutions of surveillance and control). The Arab states that gained independence after World War II were weak by design. France and the United Kingdom, the colonial powers, had seen little reason to build effective governments or provide social services to the populations. The strongest institutions they created were armies, but even those were kept small and aimed at maintaining domestic order, not fighting wars. The endemic instability of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, with frequent military coups, the fall of monarchies, and the challenge of revolutionary pan-Arabism, followed naturally from that inherent state weakness. Then, in the 1970s, a switch flipped. The Arab world, famous in the decades following World War II for its instability, became stable. The remaining monarchies in Jordan, Morocco, and the Arabian Peninsula endured, as did military regimes in Algeria and Egypt. Baath Party rule in Iraq and Syria, which had been two of the most volatile Arab countries, solidified under Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, respectively. Even more personalist dictatorships—namely, those of the erratic Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen—were able to beat back challenges to their power for decades.

This is not to say that stability reigned everywhere. Revolution convulsed Iran in 1978–79 and produced the Islamic Republic. Turkey experienced military coups in 1971 and 1980, followed by a shaky transition to democracy. In both countries, however, the state itself continued to function. (In fact, one could argue that these short-term disruptions led to long-term stability: the governments in Iran after the revolution and Turkey after the 1980 coup each became more effective at controlling their populations.) There was also the glaring exception of Lebanon, where power was formally divided among its sectarian groups. It experienced civil war and foreign military interventions from the mid-1970s through the 1980s and beyond.

The strengthening of Middle Eastern states was partly the result of the socialist policies that so many regimes pursued after gaining independence. Land reform, the nationalization of industries, and top-down economic planning—all empowered the state. Meanwhile, the 1970s energy crises drove up the price of oil and redoubled the incentives for massive government growth. Formerly poor states now had the revenue to build large bureaucracies, armies, and internal security forces, enabling them both to distribute more benefits to their populations and to exercise greater control over them. Even the countries that exported little to no oil, such as Egypt and Jordan, benefited from the regional energy windfall, receiving foreign aid and investment from the oil states. The booming Arab petrostates welcomed millions of workers from their neighbors, relieving unemployment pressures in resource-poor Arab states.

A more stable and statist Middle East was not necessarily a more peaceful Middle East. There were violent crackdowns against armed opposition movements in a number of countries, with Syria experiencing civil-war-like conditions in the early 1980s, Algeria through most of the 1990s, and Iraq after its defeat in the Gulf War in 1991. In each case, however, the regime had the resources to hold on to power, and the fighting was largely contained inside national borders. There were international conflicts, as well: not just the Gulf War but also the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Yet all were state-to-state wars, not civil or guerilla wars. They could be ended through conventional diplomacy and, in the case of the Arab-Israeli war, by real peace treaties with Israel. Stronger states were also able to fend off the kind of political pressures and foreign meddling that in the 1950s and 1960s had brought down governments in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen and kept the region on edge. And despite the efforts of the new regime in Tehran to spread Islamist revolution to other Middle Eastern states in the 1980s, it succeeded only in the weak state of Lebanon, and there only partially so, by establishing Hezbollah.

This process of state strengthening was not pretty. The regimes that carried it out were not democratic. Political freedoms were severely curtailed, if they existed at all. The leaders were brutal to their opponents. Their bureaucracies were stultifying barriers to private-sector economic development and the functioning of civil society. The human and economic costs of building stronger states were real. But the process brought more stable domestic orders and a regional scene that, although still subject to interstate war, was also more responsive to international pressures for peace and stability. The region was neither the site of large-scale humanitarian disasters nor the source of massive refugee flows, as it is now. It was not perfect, but it was also far from today’s mess.

Why was the Middle Eastern trend of stronger states and more stable regimes reversed in the twenty-first century? In the countries that didn’t export oil, populations grew faster than resources, putting pressure on the welfare states that had been built in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel and Turkey survived by adopting export-led growth models as the world turned toward neoliberal, free-market policies in the 1990s, but both had very specific advantages: Israel had access to the........

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