“A World of Trouble” covers 10 American presidencies, from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s to George W. Bush’s. An experienced foreign correspondent who has reported from across the Middle East for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Tyler draws on decades’ worth of notebooks, numerous interviews and declassified documents. The Israeli-­Palestinian conflict runs like a thread through the narrative, but Tyler also ranges much wider, to Suez, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq conflict and both Iraq wars. He writes vividly, allowing the reader access to White House meetings, huddles in the corridors of power, seats at international summits.

Image The shah of Iran with John F. Kennedy, April 1963. Credit... Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

There are finely drawn pen portraits of the key players. Few of the presidents impress: Jimmy Carter dithers, Ronald Reagan and his advisers are clueless, Bill Clinton is distracted by the Lewinsky scandal. The local leaders seem more serious: Menachem Begin, who equated Arafat with Hitler; Yitzhak Rabin, who made peace with Arafat; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who — along with Hamas suicide bombers — helped destroy any chance of a peace agreement. Here too are crucial Arab figures: the party-loving Prince Bandar, confidant of numerous presidents; the brave but doomed Anwar Sadat; King Hussein of Jordan; and Saddam Hussein, the onetime ally against whom America eventually went to war.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the White House — like every government in history — is always riven by factions, duplicitous advisers pushing their own agendas and secret cabals plotting in the washrooms. But it still makes for delicious reading to discover, for instance, the ­power of Mathilde Krim, a fiercely pro-Israel Swiss Calvinist who was a former member of Begin’s right-wing underground, the Irgun. Krim, along with her husband, Arthur, had the ear of Lyndon B. Johnson, apparently more so than did Dean Rusk, his secretary of state, and Robert McNamara, his defense secretary. On Memorial Day in 1967, while Israel and Arab countries were preparing for imminent war, President Johnson was “cavorting” at his Texas ranch with the Krims and other friends.

Tyler is especially good on America’s relationship with Iran. He dissects President Carter’s tortured pusillanimity as he tried to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the need to prop up an American ally, the shah, whose regime was kept in place by secret-police torturers. Not surprisingly, the mix soon turned rancid, especially when the United States backed Iraq in its war against Iran. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja. Tyler, along with other foreign correspondents, was flown there by the Iranians on a risky mission inside Iraqi airspace. As many as 5,000 civilians perished. Tyler remains haunted by what he saw that day: “the bodies of a dozen or so small girls who had been playing the day of the attack. They lay like dolls splayed randomly on the gravel bed, eyes open in some cases, staring skyward. The faces seemed to beckon, as if impatient for the living to gather them in.” At the time, Hussein was an American ally. The Defense Intelligence Agency sent two officers to Baghdad with comprehensive plans for an air war, showing Iranian air defenses and fortifications. The agency knew Iraq was using chemical weapons, but still the intelligence flowed. When Congress protested the Halabja gassing, Republican leaders, including Dick Cheney, blocked the calls for sanctions against Hussein.

Despite its 600-odd pages, “A World of Trouble” feels unbalanced in places. The chapter on George W. Bush’s presidency, which covers the rising threat of Al Qaeda, 9/11, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, is compressed into 30 pages, while the American entanglement in Lebanon gets almost double that number. When the subject is not the Middle East, Tyler is less confident and makes several errors. He writes that during the Yugoslav wars, President George H. W. Bush was unwilling to commit American troops to Bosnia partly because he feared humiliating “Gorbachev” in “the heart of what the Soviets saw as their sphere of influence.” In fact, when the Bosnian war started, ­Boris Yeltsin was the president of Russia and the Soviet Union no longer existed. Tyler also writes that “a quarter-million” were slaughtered in Rwanda; the usually accepted figure is 800,000.