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EPILOGUE From the end of World War I to the late 1960s, an evolving, informal network of specialists—somewhat transnational in scope—from academia, the business world, government, and the media was responsible for interpreting the Middle East for American audiences. In the years between World War I and World War II, that network comprised the heirs of nineteenth-century missionaries, philanthropists, educators, ancient Near East specialists, and an emerging group of policy intellectuals. Members of this nascent network combined a fundamentally Orientalist approach to interpreting the region with an evolving understanding of the United States as a great power with global interests, particularly in the natural resources of the Middle East. The absence of expertise on the contemporary Middle East became manifest during World War II and the early Cold War, and spawned efforts to create new programs and centers for training professional specialists in the modern Middle East, with the specific goal of producing knowledge for the benefit of the state. The network achieved its greatest influence from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s as policymakers implemented social science–based theories of modernization to try to transform the region. Participants in this network imagined the Middle East of the past, the present, and the future by focusing on four key themes. Specialists turned first to Islam and what they believed was its inherent political and totalitarian nature as the most obvious marker of difference between the United States and the Middle East. They considered a potentially totalitarian Islam to be a force that dominated daily life in the region and used it to justify or explain the enduring existence of what they imagined were stagnant economic, political , and social structures there. Islam was therefore seen as the cause of an overwhelming identitycrisis enveloping much of the Middle East as it entered the postwar era. As such, Islam became in the minds of network members a force with major political implications throughout the region and globally. Network members contemplated whether Muslims might determine the out- 236 EPILOGUE come of the Cold War. Over time, network participants came to see Islam as receding in importance and being superseded by secular nationalism as the dominant force in the Middle East. Nonetheless, they still wondered whether Islam might support the goals of nationalist leaders and movements and if the religion would therefore remain a significant factor in the Middle East and in U.S. relations with the region. These interpretations of Islam were closely related to growing concerns over regional nationalism and its connections to mass politics, the second theme network members focused on. Initially, specialists developed two interpretations of Middle Eastern nationalism. One portrayed nationalism as a product of intellectual and anticolonial movements that took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that drew inspiration from the educational initiatives of U.S. missionaries and philanthropists.The other emphasized charismatic individuals like Mustafa Kemal, Reza Khan, and ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Ibn Saʿud as the focal points of a generally benign force that offered another means of working through an overwhelming regional identity crisis and that was designed to represent the desires for political independence of the region’s peoples. Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser in Egypt, and U.S. policymakers’ responses to those leaders from the late 1940s through the mid 1950s challenged this view and convinced network members that the increasingly strident nationalist movements were far less benign than originally believed. From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, network members developed a more nuanced interpretation of Middle Eastern nationalist movements that stressed areas of common concern between movements and the United States while trying to downplay more contentious issues such as the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless, specialists remained ambivalent, if not openly critical, regarding the close relationship they believed continued to exist between nationalist movements and mass politics in the region. Concerns about how to promote controlled transformation of the region, which network members believed would be inspired by spiritual crisis, rising nationalist movements, and growing pressure for more representative economic , political, and social structures, emerged as the third theme specialists focused on.The U.S. government followed a policy of liberal developmentalism during the interwar period and immediately after World War II, and the private sector—particularly U.S. oil companies like ARAMCO—played the dominant role in pursuing this agenda. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, a consensus emerged among specialists and U.S. policymakers that [3...

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