The United States has actively pursued diplomatic relations with the Middle East because of its strategic geographic location and because of U. S. oil interests in the region. Although the definition of the term “Middle East” has fluctuated over time, it is generally defined as the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, lying at the crossroads between Africa, Europe, and Asia. The region most commonly includes the nations of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. Several other nations have been considered part of the Middle East at times, including Turkey and Cyprus; the Eurasian countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia; the African nations of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Somalia, and Sudan; and the non-Arab nations of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In its diplomatic relations, the United States has had to maintain a precarious balance between support for the state of Israel and good relations with the oil-producing Arab nations. Relations in the Middle East have been complicated by the long-standing friendship between the United States and Israel, a commitment that on several occasions required the United States to support and defend Israel against the hostile attacks of its Arab neighbors. At the height of the cold war, the Middle East region was a focus of the power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the United States typically siding with Israel and the Soviet Union supporting the Arab states.
Arab-Israeli tensions date back to the creation of Israel in 1947, when the United Nations (UN) partitioned the British mandate of Palestine to make room for a Jewish homeland. When Israel declared its independence in 1948, the United States immediately recognized the new state; but the surrounding Arab nations did not acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Tensions erupted into war several times in the latter half of the 20th century. The Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 proved particularly troublesome for the United States in its support for Israel.
In June 1967 Israel became embroiled in a war with the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In what came to be known as the Six-Day War, Israeli forces captured and occupied the part of Jerusalem formerly controlled by Jordan; the regions known as the West Bank, on the Jordan River, and the Gaza Strip along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; the Sinai Peninsula, as far as the eastern bank of the Suez Canal; and the Golan Heights, an area from which Syria launched attacks on Jewish settlements in northern Israel. Israel’s actions led to an impasse with its neighbors and displaced Palestinians in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, fueling animosity between Israelis and Palestinians that accelerated militancy throughout the rest of the century. In response to the hostilities, Egyptian leader Abdel al-Nasser alleged that the United States and Britain had aided Israel in the attacks. Nasser closed the Suez Canal and cut off diplomatic ties to the United States and Britain. The Soviet Union sided with Egypt, condemning Israel for its aggression. Intermittent fighting over the next five years threatened to draw the superpowers into the conflict. The UN Security Council passed a resolution within months proposing terms for lasting peace: Israel would evacuate the occupied territories and Arab nations would recognize Israel as a state. Despite the resolution, Israel refused to relinquish the occupied territories considered vital to its security and insisted on direct talks with the Arabs rather than a deal brokered by the international community and enforced by UN troops. The U. S. policy over time remained one of support for Israeli autonomy in exchange for land.
The Yom Kippur War had greater repercussions for U. S. relations in the Middle East. On October 6, 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched an attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai and Golan Heights to reclaim their occupied territories. While the United States sent arms and supplies to Israel, the Soviet Union and Arab neighbors backed Egypt and Syria. Israeli troops turned back both offensives and launched counterattacks until the UN arranged a cease-fire later that month. What appeared to be a military victory for Israel proved devastating for its allies, as the Arab oil-producers agreed to an oil embargo against the United States in retaliation for its support of Israel. While U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger worked to mediate a settlement over the next several months, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) cut oil production and joined with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in raising prices. OAPEC extended the embargo to include Europe and Japan, both of whom depended more heavily on oil from the Middle East than the United States. The 1973 oil embargo and cut in production led to gas shortages, higher prices, and unemployment in the Western nations, driving their economies into recession. Gas shortages in the United States eventually resulted in a lower speed limit for interstate traffic, year-round daylight savings time, and production of more fuel-efficient cars by
American car companies. The embargo ended in March 1974, after Kissinger was able to negotiate an agreement between the warring factions. Efforts intensified to settle the conflict in order to prevent another oil crisis and to woo Egypt from its alliance with the Soviet Union.
As part of his policy to improve relations with the Middle East, President James Earl Carter, Jr., sought to normalize relations between Israel and Egypt. In 1978, Carter invited Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin to his retreat at Camp David, Maryland, for peace talks. The two leaders reached an agreement, the Camp David accords, which finally ended hostilities between Israel and Egypt and resulted in Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. They formally signed a peace treaty in March 1979. Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, but the treaty did not bring peace to the Middle East. Although the Camp David accords were a brilliant success for the Carter administration, he was not able to follow up with a settlement of the Palestinian situation because of other crises brewing in the Middle East: the loss of Iran as an ally and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
A revolution in early 1979 brought Iran under the authority of Muslim clerics led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who ousted the ruling shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In November 1979, when the shah entered the United States for medical treatment, a mob of radicals, with Khomeini’s support, stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took the American diplomats hostage. Carter’s efforts to gain their release failed; the hostages were held for 444 days and released upon Ronald W. Reagan’s inauguration as president. The Reagan administration inherited the economic woes resulting from the situation in Iran, as the disruption in Iranian oil production once again led to oil shortages and higher prices. The loss of Iran as an ally was a strategic loss as well, as Iran had formerly helped with Soviet containment and acted to stabilize the Middle East from Soviet-backed Iraqi aggression.
A month after the embassy takeover, in December 1979, Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan. Carter reacted
Protesters cheer in support during a demonstration against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, September 24, 2007, in New York City. (McCrath/Cetty Images)
To the Soviets with economic sanctions, boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and ended talks on arms limitations with the Soviet Union. The Soviets remained in Afghanistan until 1989, shortly before the fall of Soviet communism. However, the war left a legacy of instability and poverty in Afghanistan that enabled a militant fundamentalist Islamic sect, the Taliban, to assume power.
The Reagan administration’s involvement in Arab-Israeli negotiations was limited. However, Reagan allowed U. S. troops to serve as part of a multinational peacekeeping force overseeing the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon in 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon to drive out PLO terrorists. The U. S. troops left Lebanon in 1984 after 241 marines died in a truck bomb attack on their barracks in Beirut and the U. S. embassy in Beirut sustained a similar attack. By the late 1980s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and the Palestinians intensified when the head of the PLO, Yasir Arafat, recognized Israel’s right to exist and renounced the use of terrorism.
President George H. W. Bush opened the door to such negotiations by calling a conference in Madrid in 1991, but it fell to his successor, William J. Clinton, to finalize a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat signed an agreement in May 1994 that began the transition to Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin and Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. But many hard-liners on both sides opposed the negotiations: Right-wing Israelis did not want to withdraw from occupied territories that they believed had belonged to the Jews since biblical times, and the most militant Palestinians refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to the negotiations. Until the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, Middle Eastern diplomacy revolved around mediating peace talks between Israel and its neighbors and protecting oil interests. Diplomatic relations have since broadened to include efforts to encourage democratic practices and discourage support for terrorist organizations among nations of the Middle East.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein created instability in the Middle East when he invaded neighboring Kuwait, a major oil-producing nation, on August 2, 1990. This invasion threatened oil supplies from Kuwait and posed a serious threat to Saudi Arabia, an American ally, which controlled more than a fifth of the world’s known oil supply. The George H. W. Bush administration imposed a trade embargo on Iraq and called for UN intervention in the crisis. On January 12, 1991, Congress approved the use of military action in the Persian Gulf. Following air strikes in February, the United States and a coalition of allied troops, led by General Norman Schwarzkopf, launched a ground invasion into Iraq. The first Persian Gull War forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait but not before the Iraqi troops set fire to Kuwait’s oil fields. After five days of fighting, Hussein was forced to accept a cease-fire. The United States lost only 148 troops. Under the truce, Hussein agreed to UN inspections in his country to guarantee the disposal of weapons of mass destruction. In 1998, after continued refusal to cooperate with UN inspectors, Hussein expelled the inspectors, setting the stage for a second American invasion. The administration of William J. Clinton launched periodic air strikes on Iraq and continued a policy of economic sanctions to pressure the Hussein government to allow weapons inspections. U. S. and international officials warned that Hussein was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction and was providing a sanctuary for antiAmerican and anti-Western terrorists.
The hope for Middle East peace that arose from talks between Israel and Palestine in the early 1990s faded with the growing threat of terrorism. Terrorist organizations such as Hamas, a militant Palestinian group opposed to both Israeli occupation and Palestinian negotiation, Islamic Jihad, a militant Islamic group responsible for violent attacks on Israelis and Americans, and Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group based in Lebanon, have further complicated efforts to achieve peace in Israel. In 1996 the rise to power of a radical Sunni Muslim sect, the Taliban, in Afghanistan facilitated the growth of another deadly terrorist organization, al-Qaeda. Led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the organization sought refuge in Afghanistan, where it built training camps from which to launch attacks against the West. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacks on two U. S. embassies in 1998, an attack on a U. S. naval vessel in 2000, and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.
Diplomatic efforts in the Middle East have turned to ending terrorism, ending state sponsorship of terrorism, and finding a way for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side. President George W. Bush called on the international community, including the nations of the Middle East, to join together in putting an end to terrorism as a solution to conflict. The United States became embroiled in two wars in the Middle East during Bush’s term. The war in Afghanistan began in 2001 as an effort to bring the al-Qaeda terrorist network responsible for the attacks on September 11 to justice and to help the people of Afghanistan rebuild a democracy. In March 2003 the United States went to war with Iraq for a second time, as Saddam Hussein continued to defy UN resolutions calling for him to account for chemical, biological, and nuclear materials used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, and for harboring terrorist organizations. No WMD were found in Iraq after the invasion, leading to charges that the Bush administration went to war on false pretenses. Relations between the United
States and Iran also remained strained over suspicions that Iran aided insurgents in the fight against U. S. soldiers in Iraq and over Iran’s development of nuclear capabilities in defiance of international demands.
Bush also called for the creation of a Palestinian state but hoped to do so with new leadership for the PLO. The death of Yasir Arafat in November 2004 offered the hope that negotiations could go forward. Negotiations stalled again in early 2006 when elections brought Hamas to leadership in the Palestinian Authority (PA), the group responsible for the administration of Palestinian lands. The U. S. and European Union suspended funding for the PA, and in September 2006 the moderate Fatah party joined with Hamas in a unity government to give the PA legitimacy. The two groups fought intermittently for control, sometimes in deadly conflicts. By June 2007 Hamas had ousted Fatah from the Gaza Strip, killing several of its leaders in bloody public executions and, in effect, isolating the Palestinians of Gaza from those in the West Bank and from the Western world. In 2008 Israel—after several months of enduring rocket attacks from Hamas militants—retaliated with air strikes, followed by a ground offensive that featured fierce fighting in the streets of Gaza. Faced with a humanitarian crisis, the United Nations and the rest of the major world powers scrambled to negotiate a cease-fire. Due to U. S. military involvement in the Middle East, tensions between the United States and Arab countries were running at an all time high under President Bush. President Barack Hussein Obama attempted a more conciliatory tone, while emphasizing that the United States does not see Muslims as the enemy. The Muslim response has generally been that actions speak louder than words, and suspicion of U. S. motives still linger, but it also carries weight with many that Obama has relatives that are Muslim.
See also Afghanistan War; energy; Iraq War.
Further reading: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Making War to Keep Peace (New York: ReganBooks, 2007); Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
—Cynthia Stachecki
World History
