The Middle East has a way of confounding American leaders and undermining legacies. Just eight days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, national security adviser Jake Sullivan noted with satisfaction that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Two weeks before the fall of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak in the early days of the Arab Spring, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.” Perhaps most infamously, on New Year’s Eve in 1977, President Jimmy Carter called the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s dictatorship in Iran an “island of stability.” Nine days later, the first small rally in the Iranian Revolution took place. The rallies didn’t stay small for long.