After two decades of war on terror, it is particularly important, for both academic and policy purposes, to clearly understand why the US formidable mobilization of means and might has transformed into a such a blatant geostrategic defeat of the US and its allies in the broad Middle East. This is all the more paradoxical that the WOT achieved a remarkable series of key tactical victories – such as the toppling of hostile regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; the crippling of the national economies of enemy states Iran and Syria by sanctions; the successful targeted killing of lead terrorist Usama Bin Laden, ISIS cult leaders Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and his successor, as well as Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, among others. In other words, why have so much diplomatic, military, and financial power, and so many tactical victories not led to what was supposed to become, according to the US government, a new and ‘greater Middle East’? With most authors being from or living in the Middle East, this book is unique as it brings perspectives from the region. Of equal importance for this inter-disciplinary book, several chapters focus on the analysis of the changing policy rationale, the regional legacy, the affected energy trade, and geostrategic consequences of twenty years of war on terror in Afghanistan and across the Middle East and North Africa. This is a crucially important task as we are entering, we argue, the era of a post-American Middle East.Chapters "Introduction" and "Conclusions" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License a via link.springer.com. weiterlesen