America in the Middle East

9 Key excerpts on "America in the Middle East"

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  The Gulf Conflict and International Relations

  • Ken Matthews(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1The Middle East in historical context

  THE ‘MIDDLE EAST’ DEFINED

  The Middle East is a construction of the European mind. In intellectual and cultural terms, as has already been observed in the idea of Orientalism’, the Middle East is a product of the European imperial and bourgeois imagination. What might be termed the ‘politics of exotica’ describes the whole ethos of nineteenth-century European exploration, not only of the Middle East but of much of the globe. The era of exploration was financed very often by European governments for political/ imperial reasons, but the incentive for the individual explorers and travellers themselves was a fascination with the ‘exotic’, with alien peoples and their cultures, customs and languages.1 Thus the foundations of the European conception of the Middle East is based upon the accounts of these European travellers— in many ways these accounts ‘defined’ the Middle East in cultural terms.

  But of course the very term ‘Middle East’ is essentially a geographical term and only has meaning when it is used in a relativistic way. The reference point of that relativity is Europe. It refers to a region which is east of Europe but not so far east as India or China. It is perhaps alone of the ‘regions’ of the world (themselves fabrications) in being referred to almost exclusively in terms of geography rather than a specific and unique designation. There is the ‘Far East’, but that can be broken down into South-East Asia, the East Indies, the Indian subcontinent, Indo-China— all of which terms include reference to a named continent or named region. The Middle East is merely that region which is in the European mind mid-way between Europe and India or Europe and China.

  The Middle East is also defined politically in European terms. The ‘importance’ of the Middle East globally has been gauged in terms of European interests. It occupied a geostrategic position vital to European imperial power. Territorially it straddled the land access to Britain’s Indian empire. Its strategic importance to Europe was considerably enhanced, of course, with the building by the Frenchman, de Lesseps, of the Suez Canal in 1869, which gave vital sea access to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and later, even in the post-colonial period, represented Europe’s ‘lifeline’ in terms of international trade and post-colonial defence commitments. In the Suez crisis of 1956 the Canal fulfilled Ernest Renan’s prediction to de Lesseps in 1885 when he said, ‘You have marked out a great battlefield for the future’. This geostrategic signficance of the Middle East was enhanced in the post-1945 growth of the Cold War, in which, in addition to its importance in relation to the ‘Far East’, the region became a theatre of superpower rivalry and always a dangerous theatre for potential superpower military conflict.

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  Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East

  • Omnia El Shakry(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  Part Three Understanding and Teaching the Contemporary Middle East 151 US Foreign Policy in the Middle East N a t h a n J . C i t i n o A t the beginning, I ask students: “What comes to mind when I say ‘the United States and the Middle East’?” They typically respond with a series of stock images: the biblical Holy Land; the desert; oil; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Islam; and “terror- ism.” Such responses provide an opportunity for analyzing student pre- conceptions. These include a tendency to reduce the US encounter with the Middle East to stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims and to seem- ingly age-old religious conflicts. Historians have debated whether such stereotypes have influenced US policy. Some have even cited representa- tions of the Middle East in popular culture, from the Disney film Aladdin to TV series such as Homeland and video games such as Call of Duty. 1 A useful activity is discussing how stereotypical images of the Middle East might be related to the US role there. Your discussion can set the stage for later debates about the relative importance of domestic politics, religion, strategy, and economic interests in American policy making. This chap- ter explains how empire can be used as a framework for studying US relations with the Middle East. As a pedagogical approach, it recom- mends asking students to analyze particular primary historical sources in order to understand the changing nature of US imperial power and the ways in which American elites have sought to legitimize that power. Empire as a Framework Empire provides a useful framework for teaching about the US encounter with the Middle East since the nineteenth century. Part Three: The Contemporary Middle East 152 The geographic expression “Middle East” was popularized by American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan to describe the place of the region in Britain’s empire. 2 The first advantage of an imperial framework is that many students will recognize it.

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  The Cold War

  A Beginner's Guide

  • Merrilyn Thomas(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  But the Middle Eastern struggle to remain aloof from the Cold War was as hopeless as trying to hold back the tide. Inexorably, the region was pulled into the mesh, trapped in the logic that decreed if you are not with us, you are against us. It was a logic that was frequently self-fulfilling. The nuances of Middle Eastern politics were largely lost on Americans who came newly to the region and saw only a strategically vital area in their own conflict. The Soviet Union, more practised in the art of Middle Eastern politics, helped itself to the spoils which came its way, often as the result of US blunders.

  There were three particular factors which differentiated the Middle East from other regions of the world. One was the presence of oil. Large reserves in countries such as Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia were always a consideration in the decision-making processes of the oil-thirsty superpowers. The second factor was the Arab–Israeli conflict. The whole period was punctuated by brief wars and sporadic skirmishes between Israel and her Arab neighbours, particularly Egypt. In the context of the Cold War, this had a destabilising effect but was not central to the global struggle. America and the Soviet Union acted either as cheerleaders or referees, the former on behalf of the Israelis and the latter for the Arabs. The third factor was the rise of a new political force based around the predominant religion of the area. Islamism rejected both communism and capitalism as political models and became the enemy of both. The simple Cold War logic of East versus West, which was difficult to apply to secular Middle Eastern leaders, became even less valid with the rise of Islamism.

  The Middle East is a region with a recorded history that stretches back many thousands of years. The countries contained within it have experienced over the centuries domination by Greeks, Romans, Turks and Arabs, among others. It is an area with no rigid borders. The term ‘Middle East’ is a loose description, coined by the British, of the area that lies at the juncture of Europe, Africa and Asia and includes countries such as Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and small states in the Arabian Gulf. For the purposes of this chapter, it also includes Afghanistan and the countries of North Africa. Its geographical situation has made it strategically important and also influential in world affairs over many centuries. It is home to great civilisations which have provided a basis for global erudition.

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  The Modern Middle East, Third Edition

  A Political History since the First World War

  • Mehran Kamrava(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Following the Gulf War, American involvement in the Middle East became more pervasive than at almost any other time in the past, with the U.S. Navy maintaining a seemingly permanent presence in the Persian Gulf and American troops stationed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. This new “pax Americana” was sure to inflame the simmering anger of the econom-ically frustrated, politically repressed Middle Easterners. They channeled this anger toward local rulers and their powerful patron, the United States. Throughout the 1980 s and 1990 s, the deepening penetration of the Middle East by the United States provoked increasing anti-Americanism. As the scholar Fouad Ajami has keenly observed, “From one end of the Arab world to the other, the drumbeats of anti-Americanism had been steady. But the drummers could have hardly known what was to come. The magnitude of the horror that befell the United States on Tuesday, September 11 , 2001 , appeared for a moment to embarrass and silence the monsters. The American imperium in the Arab-Muslim world hatched a monster.” 59 America’s role in the Middle East after the Gulf War was an outgrowth of its pursuits in the region as far back as the late 1940 s. American policy THE GULF WARS AND BEYOND / 197 toward the Middle East since World War II has all too often been incoher-ent, reactive, and inconsistent. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern three primary objectives or guidelines that have generally informed U.S. policy toward the Middle East: maintaining the region’s territorial status quo in terms of the post-1948 boundaries; securing relatively easy access to the region’s vast oil resources; and containing the threat posed to U.S. interests by regional or global rivals, whether that threat came from the former Soviet Union during the Cold War or from Iran and Iraq afterward. The degree to which successive administrations in Washington have succeeded in defending U.S.

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  The Middle East and the United States

  History, Politics, and Ideologies

  • David W. Lesch, David W. Lesch, Mark L. Haas, David W. Lesch, Mark L. Haas(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Soon the realization that the reconstruction of Europe and Japan—as well as the postwar economic boom in the United States—would become more and more dependent on Middle East oil (more than two-thirds of the world’s known reserves) boosted the policy significance of the region in the eyes of Washington’s policymakers. Moreover, the strategic value of the Middle East became linked to the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States came to believe that it was the only nation that could successfully prevent Moscow from extending its influence in the region in the wake of the weakened British and French imperial positions. As a result, the Middle East became a policy priority for post–World War II administrations. The emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 reinforced US interest in the Middle East, but this event also complicated Washington’s relations with, and objectives toward, the Arab world, as Arabs increasingly perceived US and Israeli interests as being one and the same. Complication and complexity came to define the US–Middle East relationship in the aftermath of World War II and the initial stages of the Cold War, especially as it became intertwined with the decolonization process, Arab nationalism and state building, and the emerging Arab-Israeli conflict. Part I of this book, “The US Enters the Middle East,” examines some entry points into the region since the beginning of the republic. In Chapter 1, Robert Allison looks back at America’s views and interactions with the Middle East during the earliest years of the republic, showing how many Americans held a distorted image of the region and Islam and how these misperceptions contributed to the Tripolitan War

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  Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East

  • Allen Webb(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Bush’s view that the perpetrators did what they did because “they hate our freedoms.” Rather, they say, a mood of resentment toward America and its behavior around the world has become so commonplace in their countries that it was bound to breed hostility, and even hatred. And the buttons that Mr. bin Laden pushes in his statements and interviews win a good deal of popular sympathy – the injustice done to the Palestinians, the cruelty of continued sanctions against Iraq, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the repressive and corrupt nature of U.S.-backed Gulf governments – win a good deal of popular sympathy. The resentment of the U.S. has spread through societies demoralized by their recent history. In few of the world’s 50 or so Muslim countries have governments offered their citizens either prosperity or democracy. Arab nations have lost three wars against their arch–foe – and America’s closest ally – Israel. A sense of failure and injustice is rising in the throats of millions. (Ford, “Why”) Clearly, a deeper understanding of the relations of the Middle East to the West does not require advanced degrees in Middle Eastern studies. Basic information about colonialism and Western intervention in the Middle East provides a starting point. A History of Colonialism and Intervention While people in the Middle East have great respect for the people, culture, and technology of Europe and America, as mentioned in the discussion of Orientalism in Chapter 1, there is a history of European and American intervention in the region that has damaged relations. The history of intervention is widely known in the Middle East and by Middle Eastern writers, but tends to be unknown, forgotten, or generally overlooked outside the Middle East, particularly in America and Europe. Understanding this history is critical for teachers and students who seek to learn about the Middle East today, including attitudes, politics, literature, and culture

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  Anti-Americanism

  • Andrew Ross, Kristin Ross, Andrew Ross, Kristin Ross(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  Shohat : This is the kind of paradoxical situation that populations in the Middle East, as in many countries throughout Africa and Latin America, have found themselves tangled up in. There is a bitter irony expressed in attitudes toward the discourse of democracy, when the very forces struggling to democratize have been suppressed by regimes imposed and managed by colonial or ex-colonial powers. All the talk about “bringing democracy to the Middle East” comes from powers that have stood in the way of democratizing. In fact, you can argue that this dissonance prepared the ground for the contemporary skepticism about the U.S. role in the region.

  Khalidi : The same was true in Iran, in the Ottoman Empire, and, to a lesser extent, in a number of other countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq. But when we look for the roots of attitudes towards the West, what’s usually missing is a sense of how these elites have always been open to democratic ideas and constitutionalism.

  Shohat : The struggle for democratization in the Middle East has often been complicated, though, by ideologies of modernization. Along with the battle for liberation from colonialism, nationalism also offered a legitimate vehicle for expressing the desire for modernity, which was identified with the “West.”

  Khalidi : Precisely, and what’s also missing from the general perception of the Middle East as intrinsically anti-American is the fact that for the first half of the twentieth century, the Middle East was overwhelmingly pro-American.

  Shohat : Absolutely. “America” was in many ways perceived to be somehow “outside” the violent dynamic of British and French colonialisms. Of course, this perception ignored the U.S.’s own colonial history, and also its imperial policies in places like Latin America, carried out partly under the guise of the Monroe Doctrine. But I think that, at least within the popular imagination, the distance of the U.S.—and I don’t mean only geographical but also political—allowed it to remain untainted by the anti-colonial sentiment throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

  Khalidi

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  The Middle East in International Relations

  Power, Politics and Ideology

  • Fred Halliday(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The challenge to any analysis of the Cold War is to do justice to both dimen-sions, relating events and conflicts of the Cold War at the state level to underlying historical and sociological dynamics. The inter-relationship of these different dimensions was not one of straightforward confrontation between the two blocs as it was in Europe. Rather the Cold War in the Middle East was beset by strategic cross-currents. The United States, for example, had political and strategic interests in Israel, but its main economic interests, in oil, were in the Arabian Peninsula. 2 Even that interest in oil was not so much one of direct dependency of American firms importing oil to the USA itself, as it was financial and political, in terms of the advantage given over other developed allies that were so reliant on Gulf imports. For its part, the 1 Richard Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: the United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941–1991 , London: Routledge, 1995; Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim eds., The Cold War and the Middle East , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 2 Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil , Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power , London: Simon and Schuster, 1993. 97 98 History Soviet Union established strategic alliances with Arab nationalist regimes, such as Egypt and Iraq, even as the latter suppressed communist parties. The two major powers in the Cold War also had very different geographic interests in the region: the USSR, which bordered the Middle East, was most concerned about the emergence of strategic and other challenges along its southern border, and therefore concentrated particularly on its non-Arab neighbours – Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan – what it termed the ‘Central East’; the USA was more concerned with Israel and the Arab world.

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  The Cambridge World History: Volume 7, Production, Destruction and Connection, 1750-Present, Part 1, Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making

  • J. R. McNeill, Kenneth Pomeranz(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  part iv * WORLD REGIONS 18 The Middle East in world history since 1750 john obert voll The Middle East “is a focal point of international relations; it is an area that emanates international issues, not an area where they are merely played out. As a bridge between Asia, Africa, and Europe, as the oil-producing center of the world, as a battlefield of opposing nationalisms, as a major area of big- power competition, the Middle East plays a major role in the international system.” 1 Tareq Ismail’s description of the Middle East, written in the middle of the twentieth century, identifies the key elements of the place of the Middle East in modern world history. The region’s central location in the eastern hemisphere gives it a special significance, both strategic and cultural. Middle Eastern oil is essential to modern industrial society. World views and ideologies articulated in the region have been important elements in world history, from ancient monotheisms to modern radical nationalisms and contemporary religious resurgences. It has been an arena for conflict among major powers from the days of the Egyptian pharaohs and Babylonians to the “Eastern Question” of nineteenth-century imperialisms and the current conflicts identified by some as a “clash of civilizations.” In the modern era, Middle Easterners experienced the changes that trans- formed societies around the globe. Increasing urbanization changed Middle Eastern societies, as it did other major societies, from social orders with peasant and rural majorities into urban majority societies. The redefinitions of gender roles affected Middle Eastern cultures as it did other regions around the globe. These social changes took different forms in the particular coun- tries within the Middle East, and the Middle East, as a region, did not have a distinctive role in these global societal transformations. The most visible global dimensions of Middle Eastern involvement in modern world history, 1 Tareq Y.

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