U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Douglas Little. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 407 pp. Map, notes, and index. $34.95.

In American Orientalism, Douglas Little surveys the broad sweep of official U.S. involvement in the Middle East since 1945. As his title implies, Little is concerned not just with the political and strategic dimensions of that involvement but with its cultural and psychological underpinnings as well. Over the last several decades, he writes, Americans have made extraordinary efforts to modernize and westernize Middle Eastern societies. "Yet early in the new millennium many Americans remain frustrated by the slow pace of social change, disturbed by the persistence of political autocracy, and appalled by the violentxenophobia of groups such as al-Qaeda emanating from a part of the world whose strategic and economic importance remains unsurpassed" (p. 2). This recurring dynamic of hope and disappointment is "the byproduct of two contradictory ingredients" in American foreign relations: "an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America's image and a profound ambivalence about the peoples to be remade" (p. 3). Little's book is accessible and incisive, deserving of a wide and varied readership.

Instead of providing a straightforward chronological narrative, American Orientalism is divided into several thematic chapters, each exploring a different facet of postwar U.S. involvement in the Middle East, whether cultural perceptions, oil diplomacy, modernization efforts, responses to radical Arab nationalism, military interventionism, or Arab-Israeli peacemaking. While this approach entails a certain amount of repetition, its great advantage is the opportunity it provides for elucidating broad patterns in postwar American foreign policy.

Little shows, for example, that almost all of the presidential "doctrines" of the Cold War were related to what he calls Britain's "slow-motion retreat from empire" in the Middle East (p. 309). The Truman Doctrine of 1947, which pledged "to support free peoples" against "attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures," resulted from Britain's withdrawal of financial support to Greece and Turkey (pp. 122-3). The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, designed to prevent the Soviet Union from encroaching on the Arab heartland, was America's response to the Suez fiasco, in which Britain forfeited its status as the preeminent Western power in the region. In the early 1970s Britain withdrew the last of its forces from the Persian Gulf region. Washington sought to fill the resulting vacuum by lavishing military aid on the shah of Iran, an arrangement rationalized under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, which had encouraged America's allies to play a greater role in their own defense. The collapse of the shah's government a decade later, combined with the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, revealed the limitations of relying on regional proxies in the Persian Gulf. The result was the Carter Doctrine of early 1980, whereby the United States pledged to repel with its own forces any Soviet attempt to gain control of the gulf region (pp. 130-52).

Far from welcoming Britain's periodic withdrawals, U.S. officials tended to see them as dangerous abdications that invited Soviet adventurism, and some of the American responses, especially the Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines, were improvised in a mood of urgency and alarm. Britain's retreat from the Persian Gulf was the most orderly in the series, but it, too, caused deep consternation in Washington. When the British concluded in early 1968 that they could no longer afford to maintain their position in the gulf, Secretary of State Dean Rusk charged that London "had got [its] priorities wrong." "For God's sake, be Britain," he implored the British foreign secretary. A few days later Averell Harriman, the Democratic Party elder statesman, told the British ambassador to the United States, "We cannot accept this decision as final. It must be reversed" (pp. 141-2). But the decision was irreversible, and within a few years the United States...