US ROLE IN THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

US Role in the Modern Middle East

US Role in the Modern Middle East

The United States has enjoyed close relations with Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East since the region emerged in its present configuration after the two world wars. U.S. economic and military assistance has played a major role in the development of important regional states such as Egypt and Jordan. Oil rich countries in the Persian Gulf region have been essential suppliers of energy resources to the United States and its industrial allies and major purchasers of U.S. commercial and military equipment. These ties have helped create a network of organizational relationships, official and personal contacts, bilateral economic and military commissions, and joint commercial endeavors between the United States and friendly countries in the Middle East.

Despite this extensive cooperation, serious tensions have often marred U.S. relations with Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, both at governmental and popular levels. Some governments and sub-national groups in the region are avowedly hostile to the United States, oppose its policies on a broad spectrum of issues, and seek to damage U.S. interests in the region, sometimes through violence.

This is particularly true of those governments that the U.S. State Department identified as supporters of international terrorism, as well as a number of militia-type groups that the State Department lists as foreign terrorist organizations. Even friendly governments in the Middle East are ambivalent in their relations with the United States, either because they disagree with specific aspects of U.S. policy (such as the Arab-Israeli conflict) or because they are constrained by anti-U.S. sentiment within their own populations.

Popular attitudes are even more complex and difficult to assess. The image of the United States as a “land of milk and honey” as well as a land of freedom and opportunity co-exists with another image of moral decadence and hostility to Islamic society in the minds of many residents of the Middle East. These conflicting images can lead to wide swings in popular attitudes toward the United States. The friendliness that many Americans encounter in casual contacts with ordinary citizens of Middle East countries can turn quickly to hostility and, on occasion, to violence when the United States adopts a policy seen by locals as inimical to Arab or Muslim interests.

The United States fell heir to a complex relationship that developed between Islamic society and the west over a period of 14 centuries. Although the various Islamic empires that existed during that lengthy period were sometimes allied with one or more European states, Islamic-western relations tended to be a story of conflict: the early Arab conquests after the emergence of the Islamic religion; the European-led crusades from the 11th to 13th centuries; the expansion of the Ottoman Turkish empire into southeastern Europe in the 15th and 16th; and the establishment of colonial or quasi-colonial regimes over much of the Arab world by France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Italy in the 19th and early ...