War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, and the Conflict with Iran - Patrick Cockburn
Published in 2020 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
Paperback published in 2021 as Behind Enemy Lies: War, News and Chaos in the Middle East
320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-83976-040-2
While we often lament the stark division within American politics and society, when it comes to foreign policy, the United States is remarkably bipartisan. Whether justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under the pretenses that they possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) or providing military aid to the Israeli apartheid regime to continue and expand their occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Democrats and Republicans alike join hands to advocate hawkish, pro-military spending policies and bills in Congress. There is an overwhelmingly hawkish bias in the United States Congress, as pro-interventionist amendments and bills have much more success in passing than dovish proposals. It seems that, perhaps more than any other arena, foreign policy reveals most clearly the ideological parallels and closeness between Democrats and Republicans as they work together to desperately assert American hegemony across the globe.
As such, when it comes to reporting on foreign policy, it is relatively rare to hear voices that scathingly critique U.S. interventionism while providing clear-eyed analysis from on the ground, especially when it comes to Middle Eastern affairs. In his 2020 book, War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, and the Conflict with Iran, Anglo-Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn offers a firsthand, dispatch-based account of the Middle East under the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, chronicling U.S. military and geopolitical engagement from 2016 to 2020. Written by one of the most respected war correspondents of the past three decades, this collection of articles draws upon firsthand reporting to critique American interventionism, document the collapse of ISIS, and expose the betrayal of Kurdish allies. Spanning from the battlefields of Mosul and Raqqa to the backroom diplomacy surrounding U.S.–Iran tensions, Cockburn offers a vivid account of military conflict and strategic confusion during the Trump presidency.
Overview:
Cockburn, a veteran Middle East correspondent, offers a compelling account of the region’s turbulence during Donald Trump’s first term as President, focusing on three major threads: 1) the defeat of Isis, 2) the betrayal and decline of Kurdish forces by the U.S., and 3) the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Cockburn weaves firsthand field dispatches with retrospective analysis that ties personal stories to geopolitical trends. From relaying the scattered and desperate reports of his contacts within ISIS-occupied Mosul (who all tragically perished by the time Cockburn could finally enter the city after the conflict) to describing the deep betrayal felt by the Kurds after the U.S. no longer found them useful after the defeat of ISIS, Cockburn delivers powerful, deeply informed takes from the ground, revealing how Trump-era decision-making reshaped Middle Eastern conflict dynamics.
The book’s narrative begins with the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Cockburn presents the killing as a strategic mistake that further complicated America’s relations with Iran and potentially undermined reconciliation efforts between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Echoing the Iraqi adage of supposed rivals who “shake their fists at each other over the table, but shake hands under it,” Cockburn explores the paradox of U.S.–Iran relations, noting moments of covert cooperation despite overt hostility.
Cockburn also chronicles the fall of ISIS strongholds, particularly highlighting key battles in Mosul and Raqqa. He stresses that while ISIS lost territorial control and the caliphate is gone, its ideological legacy and sectarian fractures that led to its rise give it the potential for its resurrection in the region. Cockburn also critiques Western air campaigns during these conflicts, comparing the devastation in Mosul and Raqqa to the destruction of Aleppo and Ghouta, with significant civilian casualties (despite initial reports denying such) and imbalanced media coverage. Cockburn highlights such double standards in Western media, as outlets frequently condemned atrocities by Russia and Syria but overlooked those committed by Turkey in Kurdish regions (particularly the invasion of Afrin).
One of the central focuses of Cockburn’s reporting concerns the pivotal moment when Trump announced the U.S. pullout from northern Syria in October 2019, a move that precipitated Turkey’s assault on Kurdish-led Rojava. Cockburn emphasizes that the Kurds, instrumental in defeating ISIS (with over 11,000 killed), were "ruthlessly discarded" when American forces withdrew from the region, leading to widespread devastation and cleansing of the Kurdish population. The decision of the U.S. to withdraw opened space for Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to assert influence in the region, often at the expense of local populations. He also explores the decline of Iraqi Kurdish autonomy after their 2017 independence referendum backfired, leading to Baghdad reclaiming Kirkuk, and forcing the Kurds to face another external threat from Iraq.
In sum, Cockburn’s sharp criticism is aimed at an erratic Trump administration that was “peculiarly ill‑equipped” for Middle East policymaking. He frames Trump’s presidency as paradoxically interventionist and isolationist, a period that "added a dangerous layer of chaos," rather than ending America's Middle Eastern entanglements. The larger regional picture includes ongoing proxy wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, with global powers like Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran jockeying for influence in the power vacuum left by U.S. retrenchment. Overall, the unpredictable interventionism of the first Trump administration was defined by a consistent pattern of on-off engagement that destabilized the region more than it stabilized.
Commendations:
There are several notable strengths to this collection of articles from Cockburn. First and foremost, Cockburn’s greatest strength remains his intimate, human-scale reporting. Drawing on decades of reporting from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, he offers a granular look at how U.S. foreign policy decisions impact actual lives. He includes voices from local fighters, civilians, and political actors that would typically be filtered or erased by Western-centric narratives. Whether describing civilians fleeing Mosul’s pulverized streets or Kurdish fighters betrayed by the American military machine, Cockburn’s proximity to warzones adds tremendous credibility. His descriptions of frontline battles and the devastation that civilians experience give the book an immediacy that abstract policy analyses often lack. As such, this is not a work of detached punditry, but rather a collection of journalistic pieces written by someone who has walked through the rubble and destruction that the instability in the region has wrought. His embedded journalism offers a rare antidote to the sanitized think tank narratives found in most foreign policy writing.
Furthermore, Cockburn’s moral condemnation of U.S. militarism is unambiguous and scathing. He details the destructiveness of the anti-ISIS campaigns in Mosul and Raqqa, comparing them unfavorably to the Russian and Syrian sieges of Aleppo. His critique of “clean war” rhetoric and the myth that U.S. airstrikes are precise and surgical (an idea echoed in Israeli IDF propaganda as well) is empirically grounded and urgently necessary in our current political moment. Such insights resonate with critical scholarship on American exceptionalism and the ideological obfuscation of imperial violence, such as Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) and Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004).
Likewise, he also sharply criticizes the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, dismantling both liberal and conservative narratives that justify endless war. Cockburn consistently exposes the hypocrisy and destructiveness of Western military interventions, illustrating how the U.S. weaponized anti-ISIS campaigns to pursue broader strategic goals, often at the expense of local populations. Cockburn excels in showing that the “defeat” of ISIS was, in many ways, a mirage. While its caliphate collapsed territorially, the social, sectarian, and economic grievances that fueled its rise remain untouched. He correctly argues that the scorched-earth tactics and indiscriminate airstrikes used to dislodge ISIS from Mosul and Raqqa only deepened Sunni alienation and sowed the seeds for future insurgency.
Following this thread of exposing hypocrisy, one of Cockburn’s most important contributions in this volume lies in his exposure of Western media’s double standards. He accurately observes that atrocities committed by U.S. allies (Turkey in Afrin) receive far less attention than those by adversaries (Syria or Russia in Aleppo), which are often overwhelmingly covered and condemned. As such, he contrasts the intense coverage of atrocities in Aleppo with the near-silence on those committed in Mosul or Afrin. By critiquing this selective moral outrage, Cockburn reiterates the notion that the media is an ideological apparatus that shields imperial violence and protects Western geopolitical interests.
Furthermore, an important narrative of the book that Cockburn repeatedly emphasizes is the systematic betrayal of Kurdish forces by their Western patrons. Cockburn documents how Kurdish-led forces (especially the YPG and SDF) were instrumental in defeating ISIS, only to be discarded by Washington in favor of appeasing Turkey, their NATO ally. He highlights the long-standing Western pattern of using Kurdish forces as proxies and abandoning them once they are no longer useful.
Cockburn’s account of the 2019 U.S. withdrawal from northern Syria is scathing in its clarity, as this move effectively cleared the path for Turkey’s assault on Rojava. Kurdish militias, especially the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are shown to have borne the brunt of the anti-ISIS fight and suffered over 11,000 casualties, only to be abandoned once their strategic utility expired. This underscores the imperialist tendency to sacrifice indigenous struggles (like the Kurdish quest for autonomy in Rojava) to the interests of regional hegemons like Turkey or global powers like the U.S. By documenting how Kurdish dreams of autonomy were shattered by great-power politics, Cockburn reinforces the dangerous perils of relying on imperial protection, especially for nascent nationalist and emancipatory movements.
Additionally, Cockburn’s treatment of the U.S.–Iran conflict is among the strongest sections of the book. He details the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani with sobriety and alarm, noting how this act of aggression escalated tensions to the brink of regional war. Yet he also highlights the paradoxes of the U.S.–Iran relationship, painting a picture of selective conflict and hostility on the surface while engaging in mutual opportunism under the table, including decades of indirect cooperation in Iraq. As such, Cockburn’s analysis avoids the simplistic binaries of “good vs. evil” that are all too common in both popular and policy discourse, where Iran is cast as the region’s ultimate villain. This perspective reinforces recent scholarly efforts to problematize the prevailing securitized and binary approach to Iran in Western foreign policy literature.
Finally, I deeply appreciated Cockburn’s thoughtful and nuanced assessment of Trump’s foreign policy during his first term. He exposes with particular clarity the absolute moral bankruptcy of Trump’s Middle East position, which he rightly characterizes as erratic, narcissistic, and destructive. However, Cockburn also reminds us that Trump did not invent these excesses of American imperialism. Rather, he simply personalized and disorganized it, adding in a spicy bit of unpredictability and chaos to American foreign policy in the Middle East (a trend which has continued well into his second term as well). By comparing Obama-era airstrikes and Trump’s indiscriminate bombings in Raqqa and Mosul, Cockburn reveals a disturbing continuity of imperial violence masked by the rhetorical and aesthetic differences between these administrations.
As such, Cockburn shows how the destruction wrought under Trump simply continued and intensified the imperial logic of previous administrations. In this sense, the book deconstructs the illusion that U.S. violence becomes more legitimate when it is technocratic and rhetorically humane (particularly under Democratic leadership, which we saw in full view with Biden’s abysmal response to the genocide in Gaza). Such anti-imperialist critiques help deconstruct the liberal and neoconservative consensus that casts American military action as inherently stabilizing or moral.
Critique:
On the other hand, Cockburn’s collection is not without a few key weaknesses. Most notably, as a compilation of essays and dispatches originally published across several years, the book lacks a unifying analytical frame. The episodic nature of each chapter, while preserving the immediacy of war reporting, makes the book feel incredibly scattered and difficult to draw broader conclusions or articulate long-term historical trajectories. The book reads as a sequence of moments rather than a unified argument. While this reflects the quickly-changing reality of the chaos of war on the ground, it also leaves the reader without a systemic framework through which to interpret these moments. These articles can also feel so quickly out of date, since subsequent developments (such as the ousting of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria) render some of Cockburn’s speculations moot and irrelevant.
Furthermore, while the book excels in exposing the tactical and moral contradictions of U.S. foreign policy (especially toward the Kurds and Iran), it remains analytically thin when it comes to structural explanations. There is little discussion of the role played by global capitalism, the arms economy, or neoliberal restructuring in producing and perpetuating war in the Middle East. While Cockburn criticizes the destruction wrought by these campaigns in the region, he largely sidesteps questions about neoliberal austerity, sectarian state-building, and the role of global capital in creating the failed sovereignties that groups like ISIS exploit for recruitment purposes.
Unlike scholars working in Marxist or dependency theory traditions, Cockburn stops short of identifying the political-economic architecture of imperial violence. Where is the critique of imperial logistics, of oil and arms economies, of postcolonial state collapse as an effect of global capitalist restructuring? Where are the links between the wars in the Middle East and the security architecture of empire, racial capitalism, and labor dispossession? Cockburn also does not connect this to the broader political economy of the media, specifically how profit margins, state interests, and elite consensus shape what counts as "worthy" suffering (a point articulated beautifully by Mohammed El-Kurd in his work Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal).
For a journalist, this is completely understandable. However, for those looking for a more robust work of critical history, they will likely be disappointed. Especially in a time when radical analysis is desperately needed to counter liberal apologetics and right-wing reactionary politics, Cockburn’s restraint feels like a lost opportunity. A more rigorous engagement with these various structural mechanisms could have pushed the analysis from observation to theory.
Additionally, despite his anti-war posture, Cockburn tends to frame events through a narrow state-centric lens, often neglecting the class dynamics, workers’ uprisings, and feminist movements within Iran and Iraq that are crucial to an emancipatory reading of the region. While he does cover the 2019 uprisings in Baghdad toward the end of the book, his narrative often privileges the actions of presidents, generals, and foreign ministers, while unintentionally marginalizing grassroots mobilizations. These mass movements are crucial to understanding the region’s resistance to both domestic authoritarianism and foreign domination. Their near-absence reinforces a top-down narrative inconsistent with radical and decolonial scholarship.
Finally, on a related note, though deeply sympathetic to the Kurds and their struggle for dignity and recognition, Cockburn doesn't engage deeply with the revolutionary socialist dimensions of the Rojava experiment (inspired by Abdullah Öcalan’s democratic confederalism). He foregrounds the Kurds’ role in defeating ISIS and emphasizes their strategic victimhood, but fails to explore the ideological foundations of the Rojava project, which is rooted in democratic confederalism, gender equality, and ecological sustainability. This absence is particularly glaring given that Rojava represents one of the most innovative experiments in bottom-up governance and leftist autonomy in the 21st century. Though Cockburn sympathizes with Kurdish suffering, he neglects the deeper ideological significance of Rojava. This omission deprives readers of a crucial counterexample to the failed state paradigms that dominate Western policy thinking and misses a key opportunity to highlight one of the most radical political experiments in the region’s recent history.
Conclusion:
Overall, War in the Age of Trump is a valuable and necessary document of a violent and incoherent era in Middle Eastern geopolitics. While its scattered structure and lack of structural analysis constrain its critical depth, Cockburn’s collection here serves as a compelling and empathetic chronicle of war, geopolitical instability, and those caught in the crossfire of imperial incompetence and cruelty. Cockburn’s work serves as a valuable primary document that is rich in observation and is ideal for readers seeking a journalist’s unfiltered insight into the fallout of Trump’s Middle East strategy, though readers would ideally supplement his insights with theoretical readings from anti-imperialist and postcolonial traditions.
As such, War in the Age of Trump is a powerful document of imperial failure and geopolitical betrayal. Cockburn’s dispatches provide essential testimony against the sanitizing narratives of empire and reveal the immense human cost of U.S. intervention. While this work is undoubtedly a vital resource, it is not sufficient alone. A stronger engagement with the revolutionary left in the region, as well as a deeper theorization of empire beyond Trump, would have elevated the book from excellent journalism to transformative scholarship. To move from critique to transformation, we must go beyond Cockburn’s account and toward a deeper analysis of global capitalism, a fuller appreciation of revolutionary movements like Rojava, and an embrace of anti-imperialist internationalism that centers people, not just policies. We must look beyond the battlefield, beyond the spectacle of statecraft, and toward the social movements and revolutionary projects that offer not only resistance, but hope for a better future and dignity for all.