America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State by Osamah F. Khalil (review)

America’s Dream Palace is a thoughtful, well-researched treatment of how the Cold War and the U.S. national security apparatus influenced the development of Middle East expertise at universities both in the United States and in the Middle East. Khalil’s archival work provides a rich foundation of stories and personalities, but it does not lose sight of the overarching themes and patterns.

Although Chapter 1 looks at U.S. interests in the Middle East during and just after World War I, the bulk of the book covers the 1940s through the 1980s. Chapter 8 and the epilogue add coverage of the 1990s through the Arab Spring to the present. U.S. national interests and a persistent belief in the superiority of Americans and the inferiority of Middle Eastern peoples drove government–university relations. At first, the U.S. government and universities were well-suited partners. As a post–World War II superpower with a growing interest and presence in the Mideast, the United States needed expertise on language, history, culture, and the like. A growing number of academics, some with modernization theory in tow, welcomed the opportunity to be consulted and, as funding became available (via, for example, the National Defense Education Act of 1958), the chance to build centers and programs to study the region. But many scholars in the United States suffered from an Orientalist perspective, Khalil argues, mirroring the government’s own sense of U.S. superiority over the people and cultures that they studied.

The American University of Beirut (aub) and The American University in Cairo (auc) became part of the U.S. government’s larger approach. Khalil’s documentation of the complex relationship, which also involved foundations, leaves no doubt that the U.S. government saw these two universities as tools for spreading American values and the American message. aub and auc both benefited from U.S. support, walking a delicate line in Lebanon and Egypt where U.S. policies were not always popular, to say the least.

The social and cultural revolution of the 1960s, including, Khalil notes, the civil-rights and anti-war movements, was a transformative period for government–university relations. U.S. scholars began to question ties with their country’s national-security establishment rather than reflexively welcoming the funding and intellectual attention. In the 1970s, the rise of the New Left and organizations like the Middle East Research and Information Project signaled a dramatic change. By the 1980s, government demand for Middle Eastern expertise was increasingly supplied not by universities but by Washington-based think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. University-based area study with its increasing skepticism about the regional impact of the nation’s foreign policy, as well as its interest in co-equal interaction with the people of the region under study, no longer fit well with the policy needs of imperial power, even if universities could still be helpful with language and other basic regional training.

Khalil’s story starts with the U.S. government’s impact on academia but, especially from the 1990s forward, becomes more about the distance between the two institutions. Eventually, the Middle East Studies Association— the major scholarly professional association—and government funding for area studies both came under attack. How the tables had turned.

Khalil’s excellent, informative book not only sets the stage for more research on the government–university relationship based on the Middle East, as he notes in the epilogue, but also leaves room for a deeper understanding of the alternative views that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s. By the twenty-first century, much of academia had become a hothouse for sustained, informed critique of U.S. government aims and policies rather than a supportive companion.