The first contacts between the United States and the Middle East occurred during late-eighteenth-century treaty negotiations with the states of North Africa and were interspersed with sporadic naval conflicts. The first sustained relations, however, resulted from American missionary efforts in various parts of the region, starting in 1819 and growing in importance throughout the nineteenth century. Aside from spreading Christianity, missionaries focused on creating educational institutions, primarily in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. One of the most important of these was the Syrian Protestant College established in 1866 (called the American University of Beirut after 1920). Similar efforts in Turkey led to the foundation of Robert College in 1863. Both institutions had a major impact on the Middle East because they educated members of local elites.
By World War I, decades of work by American missionaries and educators in these and other countries of the region had created an almost uniformly favorable view of the United States. It seemed the only Western power with no imperial designs on the region. This view was reinforced during World War I by President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and by America's championing of the principle of self-determination at the Versailles peace conference. Countries of the Middle East that were resisting the encroachment of European powers hoped that the United States would serve as a counterbalance to traditional Western imperialism. This hope was expressed forcefully to the members of the King-Crane Commission, dispatched to Syria and Palestine at the behest of Wilson to ascertain the preferences of the populations regarding which mandatory power should be chosen to help them toward independence, as specified by the Covenant of the League of Nations.
The inquiry conducted by the King-Crane Commission showed the degree of sympathy for the United States that existed in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. An overwhelming majority of those polled expressed a desire for an American mandate in preference to a British or French one. But these results became a dead letter when the U.S. Senate repudiated the League's Covenant, and the mandates for Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan were soon afterward given to Britain and France. Nevertheless, Wilson's sending a commission to ascertain their wishes made a lasting positive impression on the people of these countries.
Aside from the activities of American oil companies, this was the last major American initiative in the Middle East until after World War II. Although the oil companies played a central role in the discovery of petroleum in Saudi Arabia in the late 1930s, they were generally restricted in their activities elsewhere by their British and French rivals, both of whom exploited the advantages provided by their countries' political dominance in the region. During the war large numbers of American troops fought in and traveled through the area, but only afterward did Middle East oil production grow in importance and the United States become a major power there.
Even after the Second World War, the United States initially tended to take a back seat to Britain in the region. But the United States was soon involved in either supporting or competing with Britain on issues related to the so-called Northern Tier of Middle Eastern states--notably Turkey and Iran--as well as Palestine. In 1947 a financially straitened Britain was forced to halt its support for the governments of Greece and Turkey, creating a potential power vacuum on the southern flank of the Soviet Union. This the United States rushed to fill in keeping with the cold war atmosphere and its new role as a world power. The result was the Truman Doctrine, which proclaimed it a zone of particular American interest, the first of a series of presidential policies pertaining to the area.
In the early fifties, Britain and the United States opposed the government of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, which had nationalized the country's mainly British-owned oil industry. The overthrow of Mosaddeq and the reimposition of the autocratic rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was in large measure a joint project of the American and British intelligence services. By associating itself with Britain in this episode, the United States came to be identified with that older imperial power against which Iranians had so many grievances dating back 150 years. In time, the American identification with the shah's regime became more and more of a liability, as Iranian nationalism, originally secular in nature, developed a much more religious cast.
But conflict, more than cooperation, characterized British-American relations in the case of Palestine. Britain was engaged in a bloody conflict with the Zionist movement, whose implantation in Palestine it had originally facilitated, but which was now strong enough to stand on its own. The capability of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine--which had already developed into the embryo of the Israeli state--was greatly enhanced by the support it received from the United States, where the Jewish community was increasingly active in its behalf. The farsighted Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion, had realized as early as 1942 that in the postwar international configuration the United States would be a more powerful patron than Britain. In that year, at his urging, the Biltmore Conference in New York committed the Zionist movement to an ambitious plan for an independent Jewish state in Palestine, which inevitably placed the movement on a collision course with Britain. Ben-Gurion risked this, against the inclinations of the movement's Anglophile elder statesman Chaim Weizmann, because of his confidence in the potential for American support, which in the event proved to be fully justified.
In 1946, the United States began to exert its influence over the question of Palestine with a proposal for an Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. This group recommended the immediate entry into Palestine of 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust, who were still languishing in displaced-person camps long after the war's end, largely because of the refusal of European countries and the United States to admit them. This recommendation undermined the efforts of the British, who were struggling to maintain their commitments to their Arab clients in the region while confronting the growing insurrection of the Yishuv in Palestine. By 1947, Britain was forced to give up this impossible task and handed the question of Palestine over to the United Nations. In the U.N. General Assembly's consideration of the question in 1947, the United States played a decisive role in the passage of Resolution 181, which partitioned Palestine and allowed for the creation of Jewish and Arab states. When Israel came into existence in May 1948, the United States was the first country to extend recognition to it.
A consistent pattern in American relations with the Middle East thus emerged. The United States championed the cause of Israel while slowly replacing Britain as the major Western patron of conservative Arab regimes. The stresses of accommodating both an increasingly close relationship with Israel and ties with Arab states that were at war with Israel have marked American relations with the Arab world ever since. Relations became particularly acute during the Suez War of 1956, when the United States opposed the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in spite of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's antipathy for the nationalist regime of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
During this crisis, the desire to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting the situation was probably uppermost in the minds of American policymakers, rather than the specifics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. American preoccupation with the growth of Soviet influence in the region became another consistent pattern during the next three decades, one that Israel increasingly benefited from, in the form of American financial, military, and diplomatic support. This support escalated particularly sharply following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, after which the United States became Israel's main supplier of advanced weaponry.
Enhanced American commitment to Israel was one of the major results of the growing polarization of the Middle East along cold war lines in the 1950s and 1960s. Several Arab states aligned themselves more closely with the Soviet Union, and other regional states, including Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco, grew closer to the United States. This trend transcended the boundaries of the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, as was evidenced by the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, which committed the United States to come to the aid of any state threatened by "international communism."
This doctrine became the basis for American support for conservative regimes against their radical local rivals. It was first put into practice with the landing of U.S. forces in Lebanon in 1958 to shore up the regime of President Camille Chamoun against his domestic opposition, which was supported by the Egyptian-dominated United Arab Republic. The Eisenhower administration also tried to incorporate the Middle East into its chain of regional pacts directed against the Soviet Union, but with only limited success. The fruit of this effort, the Baghdad Pact, which later evolved into the Central Treaty Organization, was highly unpopular in many countries and ultimately included only the non-Arab Muslim states of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan.
The Kennedy administration initially tried to draw a distinction between Arab nationalist and "procommunist" regimes. Seeking to improve relations with Egypt, President John F. Kennedy initiated a personal correspondence with that country's President Nasser. But the outbreak of the Yemeni civil war in 1962, in which both Egypt and Saudi Arabia became deeply involved, and Kennedy's assassination the next year halted this process. The United States eventually ended up siding with Saudi Arabia and its clients, the Yemeni royalists, against Egypt and its clients, the Yemeni republicans, both backed by the Soviets.
In this highly polarized situation, the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War broke out, creating a set of problems for U.S. policy, most of which have persisted to the present day. Foremost among them has been the task of reconciling American sympathy and support for Israel with a desire to maintain a strong footing in Arab countries resentful of Israel's unwillingness to evacuate territories occupied during the 1967 war. This problem was partly alleviated by Egypt's shift from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation after 1970 and by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. But it persists because other aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, notably the Palestinian-Israeli dimension, have not been resolved.
While the United States was involved in efforts to resolve the Egyptian-Israeli aspect of this conflict in the wake of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, renewed importance was being attached to another American ally in the Middle East, Iran under the regime of the shah. Iran became the focus of the Nixon Doctrine of 1972, whereby in the wake of the Vietnam War experience, the United States laid greater stress on arming powerful regional allies. With American support, the shah embarked on a massive program to upgrade the Iranian military and turn his country into a regional superpower. This process both exacerbated tensions with Iran's neighbors, notably Iraq, and alienated elements among the Iranian public who were already highly critical of their nation's subordination to the United States and the shah's dictatorial rule over the country.
In 1979 a popular Islamic Revolution brought down the shah, throwing American policy in the Gulf region into disarray. The virulent anti-Americanism of the new regime, exemplified in the hostage crisis, angered Americans, arousing their concern about the Middle East as had nothing since the Arab oil boycott during the October 1973 war. The American public's long-standing lack of understanding of the region often complicated the task of U.S. policymakers. Diplomatic responses ranged from the Carter Doctrine, which proclaimed the Gulf an area vital to American interests, to the Reagan administration's sending of American warships to protect the flow of Kuwaiti oil from Iranian attacks during the Iran-Iraq War, even while the administration was covertly trying to reestablish relations with Iran, as was revealed during the Iran-Contra scandal.
At the beginning of the 1980s, American relations with the Middle East continued to be dominated by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the question of oil. Israel and the Gulf became the major preoccupations of American Middle East policymakers, with alignment with the first and hostility toward the second overshadowing much else. Thus in Lebanon in 1982-1983, the Reagan administration initially went along with Israel's invasion of that country and later committed U.S. troops there while supporting a Lebanese government backed by only one of the country's sects. The objective was apparently support for Israeli objectives in Lebanon and opposition to its local rivals, the plo and Syria; but the result was a defeat for the United States and Israel and the government they supported, at the cost of the lives of over three hundred American servicemen and diplomats, the kidnapping of many other Americans, and serious damage to American interests that had been built up over more than a century of missionary, educational, and medical efforts.
In the Gulf, the United States began the 1990s aligned with Iraq, a vestige of policymakers' obsession with the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran. The Bush administration, however, turned against Iraq after its invasion, occupation, and annexation of Kuwait in August 1990, going to war with it at the head of a thirty-nation coalition in January of the following year. The allies smashed the Iraqi army and entire domestic infrastructure in a devastating campaign that lasted barely seven weeks and cost very low American casualties among its half million troops, but left 150,000 Iraqis dead, according to American military estimates. It was unclear at the war's end how the regional vacuum created by the defeat and eclipse of Iraq would benefit American or regional interests in the long term.
After two centuries, a relationship with the Middle East that began with aspects of both conflict and constructive endeavor had become one in which the United States was the preeminent power in the region, inextricably involved in its affairs in pursuit of access to oil and strategic advantage.
Bibliography:
Seth P. Tillman, The United States in the Middle East: Interests and Obstacles (1982).
Author:
Rashid I. Khalidi
See also Camp David Accord; Cold War; Great Britain-U.S. Relations; Iran-Contra Affair; Iran Hostage Crisis; Jews; Oil Industry; opec Oil Crisis; Truman Doctrine.
