Middle East and U.S. Policy

U.S. policy toward and regarding the volatile region of the Middle East. The term Middle East is not geographically specific; it defines a region consisting of states with similar cultures, histories, and concerns. Among the countries considered part of the Middle East are Turkey, Iran, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Qatar, and Bahrain. The disputed Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are also included.

Postwar Era

The centrality of the Middle East in U.S. foreign policy dates from the post–World War II era, with the necessity of defending the sovereignty of Israel as well as guaranteeing a steady supply of oil from the region. The Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union made the Middle East as much a zone of conflict as any other part of the world and played an important role in shaping U.S. relations with local nation-states.

U.S. influence in the Middle East replaced centuries of dominance by other powers, including the Ottoman Empire, followed by the Europeans, who took advantage of the collapse of the Ottoman empire following World War I. Oil was discovered in the Middle East in the early 20th century, first in Persia (Iran) and later in Saudi Arabia. Ottoman dominance in the region was a product of geographic proximity, but the Europeans gained greater leverage in the region economically by financing modernization efforts underpinned by industrial revolution and political reform. The overall failure of these initiatives merely resulted in greater dependence. Meanwhile, oil wealth has often been considered complicit in the inability of states in the region to develop along the lines of Turkey, in which successful democratic reform moved the country toward greater parity, not to mention identification, with Western Europe.

The British and French retreated from the Middle East after World War II as part of a more general process of decolonization. Meanwhile, the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany gave greater urgency to the establishment of an Israeli state, which began in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. The state of Israel was declared in 1948, resulting in the partition of Palestine.

The Cold War and the Middle East

The wartime goodwill between the United States and the Soviet Union consolidated into the Cold War. The Arab-Israeli conflict following the founding of Israel, as well as subsequent conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, demonstrated the vitality of U.S. interests in preserving Israel. These events also served to exacerbate the Palestinian question, a problem that has been complicated by U.S. interests in the region well after the conclusion of the Cold War.

Soviet support for Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya strengthened the power of despotic regimes in each of these states, as did U.S. support for equally undemocratic—yet prowestern—governments in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf Emirates. The Suez War in 1956 demonstrated not only that the British and French were no longer superpowers in the region but also that the United States considered its own relations with countries in the Middle East to be more important than promoting French and British interests.

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