Richard Engel on "And Then All Hell Brooke Loose"

Richard Engel, NBC News chief foreign correspondent, talks with Rachel Maddow about his new book "And Then All Hell Broke Loose; Two decades in the Middle East" and the chaos that has resulted from years of U.S. military action in the Middle East.

RICHARD ENGEL: Well, the basic premise is that there was a status quo and the status quo existed for decades. And the status quo wasn't great. The Middle East muddled along. And it was corrupt and the leaders were brutal. And there was a lot of internal anguish, conflicts that were below the surface: Sunni/Shia, Arab/Persian, Turkish/Kurd. But they were all held in place, locked in place. And through eight years of military action by the Bush administration, we broke that status quo. And then through almost eight years of really inconsistent action from the Obama administration, that status quo was destroyed and all those pent-up issues became unleashed. And we're living in that chaos. And then chaos is really represented by ISIS.

And I think it is very chilling to hear senior intelligence officials say that ISIS is coming to attack the U.S. If you remember when ISIS first came out, the same intelligence briefings were that ISIS is just a local group, it doesn't have international ambitions. That's never been the case, by the way. ISIS has always had international ambitions.

So, the concept is, we had a status quo through 16 years of somewhat misguided direct action and then misguided sometimes inaction or certainly inconsistent action. We're living in this horrible period, and we have to think about what's going to come next. And I think what's going to come next is a series of strongmen, a series of dictators. I think we're going to return to a new status quo. And I think we're already starting to see that.

ISIS is going to die out. ISIS is not going to live forever. It doesn't have a winning strategy. But it may do some horrible, horrible atrocities in this country and it already has in other countries before it does.