Although the Middle East was peripheral to official American interests before World War II, the United States became deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs in the postwar period, and the nation began to play a highly visible role that persisted throughout the cold war.
Although the U. S. government had very little official interest in the region before 1941, American citizens had long been involved in Middle Eastern affairs. American private involvement during this time period was either humanitarian or economic. Missionaries had been active in the Ottoman and Persian empires since the early 19th century. American missionaries, predominantly Presbyterian, had organized numerous mission schools and even some universities, such as Roberts College in Turkey, the Syrian Protestant College (later to become the American University of Beirut), and the Alburz College of Tehran. After World War I, the vast oil reserves of the Middle East attracted the attention of American oilmen, who tried on numerous occasions to procure oil concessions in the region. The U. S. government often acted to protect American citizens and informally to support American business interests in the Middle East.
World War II and the rise of the cold war drastically increased the official American role in the region. Soon after its entry into World War II, the United States invaded North Africa with a view toward eliminating the Nazi threat to the Middle East from the west and participated in the Anglo-Russian joint occupation of Iran in the east. After the war, Great Britain, formerly the dominant Western power in the region, saw its presence gradually decline before an increased American role in the Middle East. As Allied wartime cooperation gave way to Soviet-American confrontation in the cold war, the United States became deeply enmeshed in regional politics. The first sign of official American interest was the U. S. role in expelling the Soviets from northern Iran in 1946, one of the scenes of the first cold war conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States. This was followed by the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, which provided massive amounts of aid to Greece and Turkey (and also Iran) in order to contain the spread of communism.
As the cold war took shape, American involvement in the Middle East followed two basic principles: preventing the Soviets from gaining influence in the region and maintaining Western access to inexpensive Middle Eastern oil. Middle Eastern oil was deemed vitally important to European recovery, which was in turn considered crucial to prevent communist revolutions in Western Europe. Although cold war concerns motivated American policymakers, the complexity of regional politics combined with the prior imperial claims of allies such as Great Britain and France had an important influence on the way American foreign policy was actually carried out in the region.
One theme that confronted American policymakers in the Middle East during the cold war was the rise of indigenous nationalist movements that questioned and threatened American hegemony. For example, various Arab nationalists, most notably Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, tried to play the Soviet Union and the United States against one another in order to procure large amounts of aid. Iranian politicians tried to do the same thing, although with mixed results. After Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1953, the United States turned a deaf ear to British pleas to restore their oil concession; after Mossadegh threatened to turn to the Soviets for aid, however, the United States helped to overthrow the nationalist government and reestablish monarchical rule.
The Arab-Israeli conflict constituted one of the central concerns confronting the United States. After the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, there was continuing conflict between the Israelis, the Palestinians, and neighboring Arab states. Although the Arab-Israeli conflict was not intrinsically a cold war problem, American policymakers recognized that the instability caused by the conflict hurt American interests. As a result, the United States tried to maintain regional stability and support various rounds of peace talks between Israel and its neighbors.
The end of the cold war brought with it great change with regard to American foreign policy but there has been more continuity than change with regard to the Middle East. Although containing the Soviets was no longer an issue, the objective of maintaining access to the region’s oil reserves remained as important as ever. The key issue at the heart of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was preventing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from gaining permanent control over the oil reserves of both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In addition, the threat of so-called Islamic fundamentalism has replaced communism, especially in the wake of the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran. All the while, the United States has continued to play a highly visible role in the Middle East peace process.
Further reading: James Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Musaddiq (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997); Burton I. Kaufman, The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).
—Matthew M. Davis
World History
