US and Middle East

11 Key excerpts on "US and 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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  Prisms of Prejudice

  Mediating the Middle East from the United States

  • Karin Gwinn Wilkins(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  First, I summarize key features in the US–Middle East relationship in the past twenty-five years. US Intervention in the Middle East In this section, I offer a concise and abbreviated recent history of US intervention in the Middle East (see Figure 2 for a timeline). Because I am focusing on a particular time period, this summary is quite brief, without the complexity and depth of other significant texts on the subject (Chalcraft, 2016; Cole, 2015). Although official US engagement with the region encapsulates complex and vary-ing approaches, I highlight some of the central features of foreign aid and military intervention over the last quarter century in order to contrast shifts in mapping over time, relevant to this research project. Scholars reviewing the histories of these geopolitical dynamics within the Middle East suggest that power began to shift away from British imperialism after World War II as the United States became more concerned with its role as a global leader and with its interest in oil (Doran, 2019), both factors becoming increasingly relevant after the Vietnam War (Indyk, 2019). Later, with the end of Cold War politics and an accentuated concern with terrorism, the role of figUre 2. Recent historical timeline United States / Middle East. Graphic by Alexandra Chavez. Oslo Accords II Second Palestinian Intifada US Operation Desert Fox in Iraq 1998 US War in Afghanistan 2001 US strikes against ISIL 2014 1995 2000 US Muslim Ban into US 2016 9/11 Attacks in US 2001 US-led Invasion of Iraq 2003 US kills Osama bin Laden in Pakistan 2011 US War on Terror 2003 Political protests in Arab world 2010 1996 1997 1999 2002 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2012 2013 2015 2017 2018 M a P P i n g t h e M i d d l e e a s t [ 51 ] the United States became even more pronounced in regional poli-tics, evidenced in extensive and costly military operations, eco-nomic integration, and cultural connections (Fleck & Kilby, 2010; Juneau, 2014).

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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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  Is There a Middle East?

  The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept

  • Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, Michael Ezekiel Gasper(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  THE MIDDLE EAST: DEFINED, OBLIGED, AND DENIED Part I Passage contains an image

  1

  THE EASTERN QUESTION AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

  The Genesis of the Near and Middle East in the Nineteenth Century Huseyin Yilmaz

  NEAR EAST OR MIDDLE EAST maps were first drawn at the height of intense interest in what Karl Marx labeled “the Eternal Eastern Question.”1 It was the content of this question that defined the geography of this region that came to be known as the modern Middle East. Later attempts to give a consistent geographical or cultural definition to the term all followed major international developments or were made in anticipation of major geostrategic shifts, ultimately creating multiple “Middle Easts” that were based on different sets of criteria.2 Two such attempts in recent memory were the redrawing of the Middle East following the end of the Cold War and the Greater Middle East Partnership discussed in the G-8 summit in 2004.3

  Despite staying at the center of international politics for more than a century, the region still has no standard textbook definition.4 In the popular imagination as well as academic studies, the Middle East is often conceived of as the locus of an international question rather than a geographically or culturally definable region. Except for the questions it posed, there is hardly any common element that defines the various “Middle Easts” constructed in the media, academic scholarship, and political agencies. As the nature and scope of the Middle Eastern Question change, so do the region’s boundaries. There has been no secular organizing principle to make the Middle East a meaningful region other than a historical memory built by the very term itself.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term “the Eastern Question” was generically applied to almost all conflicts taking place in Eastern Europe, including those in Poland, Macedonia, and the Caucasus. Toward the late nineteenth century, however, within the context of a broader confrontation between Europe and the Orient, the scope of the Eastern Question was extended to all of Eurasia, producing such formulations as “the Afghan branch of the Eastern Question.”5 Even Americans conceived of their western entanglements as “our Eastern Question” in reference to American-Japanese conflict.6 Reflecting this holistic view in 1878, Victor Duruy presented the three core problems of the Eastern Question as Constantinople, l’Asie Centrale , and l’Océan Pacifique .7 In some Christian apocalyptic literature, however, “the Eastern Question” referred specifically to the holy land where the demise of the Ottoman Empire would signal the coming of the Armageddon.8 For them it was a matter of divine providence foretold in scripture and that was unfolding to fulfill prophecies.9

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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)

  PART I

  The US Enters the Middle East

  US involvement in the Middle East has spanned the breadth of this country’s existence, beginning most dramatically with President Thomas Jefferson’s administration, which tried to stop pirating by the North African (or Barbary) provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s. This was a war to ensure freedom of navigation on the high seas, which was essential for US trade, as the new republic no longer enjoyed British naval protection. Aside from this early encounter, US interaction with and interest in the Middle East during the nineteenth century was limited to the private activities of missionaries and merchants. In the twentieth century, however, World War I propelled the United States onto the world stage—and into European politics—in a role it had neither sought nor experienced before. As the war was winding down, the United States quickly developed an interest in the disposition of the Middle East provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The result was Washington’s first significant official foray into the region: the King-Crane Commission was sent to Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Anatolia to inform American policy on the future of the region. Nonetheless, no US administration gave the region a high priority during the interwar years (1918–1939), although there was some interest in the growing involvement of multinational oil companies in the Middle East.

  The strategic value of the region became clear in World War II, when, in 1942 and 1943, Anglo-American forces attacked and defeated German-Italian forces in the North African campaign. 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.

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  The Middle East in International Relations

  Power, Politics and Ideology

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

    (Publisher)

  28 All of this sense of domination, at both popular and elite levels, was, of course, overlain by a reality, that of economic imbalance, great and grow-ing, between the region and the west; far from diminishing, this continued to increase throughout the twentieth century, as it had through the eigh-teenth and nineteenth. In overall terms, the fundamental international relation, one that underlay and gave meaning to the military or political systems, was the gap in economic, scientific and military power between the Middle Eastern states and peoples and those of Europe and other developed countries. In sum, nationalism and a sense of powerlessness 28 Author’s research visit, Foreign Ministry, Ankara, April 1998. The formation of the modern Middle East 93 were not autonomous ideational constructs, part of some free-floating, immovable and to the west impenetrable political culture. It was very tangible external hegemony, whether direct or indirect, that from the recomposition of state power after 1918 to the rollercoaster of globalisa-tion underlay the pervasive political culture of domination. World War II and its consequences In its promotion of ‘the’, or perhaps, rather, ‘an’ Arab revolt, 29 in its impact on the Arabian Peninsula and Iran, and, above all, in bringing about the final end of the Ottoman empire, World War I laid the foun-dations of the modern Middle East. Yet World War II, if a degree less dramatic in its direct impact on the region and in its mid-term conse-quences, had nonetheless a major transformative role. In contrast to the case in World War I, the central areas of the Middle East were not directly involved in combat: only North Africa, where Italian and German forces on the one hand and Allied forces on the other fought between 1939 and 1943, was a direct theatre of war. Even there, the participation of local military and political forces was minimal. In Iran the British and Rus-sian occupation begun in August 1941 ended in 1946.

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  The New Regional Politics of Development

  • Anthony Payne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  193 Chapter 8 The Middle East SIMON BROMLEY Identifying the Middle East as a coherent region is a difficult and, perhaps, somewhat artificial exercise. Elie Kedourie (1992: 1) says that: ‘Whether it is defined in geographical or cultural terms, and whatever its exact boundaries are held to be, there can be no disputing the fact that the Middle East is predominantly Muslim’. This is true, except that most of the world’s Muslims live not in the Middle East (however defined) but in South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, as Bernard Lewis (1998: 133) has pointed out, ‘unlike India, China or Europe, the Middle East has no collective identity. The pattern, from the earliest times to the present day, has been one of diversity – in religion, in language, in culture, and above all in self-perception.’ This may be an overstatement, but it does capture an important truth. Muslims have shared and con-tested the Middle East with Jews and Christians (to speak only of the major monotheisms); Arabs have coexisted with Persians, Turks, Kurds and Berbers (among others); and social identities have ranged from the religious, to the linguistic and ethnic, to the (national) territorial, to the secular political. Perhaps more importantly, ever since the extension of the European states-system to the region and the development of industrial capitalism in north-west Europe, the identification of a group of countries as con-stituting the Middle East has been one made by powers outside the region; it has not, for the most part, been a term of identification used within it. In the days of their empire the British referred to the ‘Near East’ as those countries that were strategically important in protecting its economic and military links to India and thence to the Far East – what are, nowadays, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Gulf States.

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  US Foreign Policy and the Persian Gulf

  Safeguarding American Interests through Selective Multilateralism

  • Robert J. Pauly, Jr(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 The United States and the Persian Gulf: A Historical Overview    

  Introduction

  Similar to many regions of the developing world, the contemporary Persian Gulf—and, for that matter, the surrounding Greater Middle East—feature characteristics illustrative of both continuity and change. Above all, those characteristics reflect the geography and history of the Gulf and its periphery as well as the distinctive identities and interests of the peoples who have established, governed and inhabited the myriad empires and states therein over the centuries. Inevitably, the names of individual leaders and their supporters and adversaries have changed from era to era. By contrast, however, the region’s ethnic, religious and political diversity has remained relatively constant. As Bernard Lewis, one of the most authoritative modern historians of the Middle East, notes,

  Unlike India, China, or Europe, the Middle East has no collective identity. The pattern from the earliest times to the present day, has been one of diversity—in religion, in language, in culture, and above all in self-perception. The general adoption at the present time, in countries east and west and north and south of the so-called Middle East, and even in the Middle East itself, of this meaningless, colorless, shapeless, and for most of the world, inaccurate term is the best indication of the lack of a perceived common identity, either at home or abroad.1

  The diversity to which Lewis refers has mitigated the capacity of the states and peoples of the Persian Gulf and broader Arab and Islamic worlds to forge the common bonds and interests necessary to ensure enduring economic prosperity and political stability. In the process, it has also led to perpetual complications in the relationships between states situated in the Western and Islamic worlds generally, and American and European leaders and their counterparts in the Gulf and across the Greater Middle East in particular. Consequently, a brief examination of the fundamental factors at play in the evolution of the identities of the states and peoples of those regions will provide an instructive foundation for the introductory discussion of US policymaking therein that ensues. That examination touches on the issue areas of geography, ethnicity, religion and politics.

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  The Middle East In Global Perspective

  • Judith Kipper, Harold Saunders(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction: The United States, the Middle East, and Our Changing World

  Judith Kipper and Harold H. Saunders

  Our dramatically changing world demands new perspectives to bring our experience into focus, new vocabulary for describing what shapes that experience, and new political tools for changing it creatively and peacefully. The new century before us demands a new way of thinking about how the world works and how peoples and nations relate. In few places is that need greater or more urgent than in the Middle East following the Gulf crisis and war of 1990-1991.

  The concepts developed over almost five centuries to explain a world of nation-states amassing military and economic power to pursue objectively defined national interests do not adequately explain how peoples and nations act today. The instruments of force, economic pressure, diplomacy, negotiation, and propaganda that leaders have used to initiate and direct change do not reliably produce expected results. Neither these familiar concepts nor the potential of those instruments seems to inspire leaders today to guide change with imagination and direction. It may one day be said that the Gulf war was among the last wars of a traditional era, not among the first of the crises handled in the perspective that will have to govern as the nuclear age matures beyond the East-West rivalry that has begun fading away.

  Nowhere have events taught this lesson more sharply than in the Middle East. The lesson is a global one, but focusing on this one area makes vivid the need for new approaches and the price of continuing to live with old perspectives and stalemates. Until we develop new perspectives, we have little chance of dealing creatively with these intractable problems. Yet in this area where more than half the inhabitants are still in their formative years, an unusual opportunity exists to help a new generation find more constructive ways to live. Just as the period following the 1973 war became a period of political change—sometimes creative, sometimes destructive—the years following the Gulf crisis and war could bring historic changes to the region. How leaders and people alike interpret what they are experiencing will determine in large part how they direct the course of change.

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  A History of the Global Economy

  1500 to the Present

  • Joerg Baten(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Middle East, north Africa and central Asia Rima Ghanem and Joerg Baten In recent years, the Middle Eastern region has been characterized in newspaper reports by its many con fl icts between religious and political groups. To understand the present situation, it is important to study the region ’ s development over the last few centuries. The fi rst impression of Middle Eastern history is the great heterogeneity of its development. We cover the geographic region between Morocco and Afghanistan (including the former Soviet Republics in central Asia and the Caucasus that have a substantial Muslim population). These countries have experienced multi-faceted development over the past fi ve centuries. However, prominent economic historians of these world regions, such as Charles Issawi (1982), have distilled some common features that characterized many of the Middle Eastern countries. One common factor was contact with Europe during the nineteenth century, which Issawi described as a ‘ challenge ’ . Just before the First World War, European merchants (and sometimes their governments) had taken over many important positions in Middle Eastern economies outside agriculture. In contrast, Issawi interprets the developments during the twentieth century as a ‘ reaction ’ in which many Middle Eastern political leaders aimed at reducing the European in fl uence. They also tried to mitigate the role of religious minorities in economic core positions of their countries. Since Issawi (1982) and Owen ( 1993 ) wrote their famous overviews in the 1970s and 1980s, some progress has been made in the quantitative analysis of long-run economic trends of the Middle East. Most famously, Ş evket Pamuk has presented his estimates of urban real wages and national income estimates for a number of countries in this region. Co ş gel and Ergene (2012) have studied the development of early modern inequality based on tax registers for northern Anatolia and additional sources.

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