A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East–from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Author: Patrick Tyler
Originally Published on Asia Chronicle News.com
Reviewed by: David StreeterHardcover: New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. 0374292892. $30 As President Obama returns from a recent monumental trip to the Middle East, it is important to gain some perspective of the historical relationship that American administrations have had with the Middle East. Patrick Tyler’s book, A World of Trouble, provides a thorough history of American presidents and their foreign policies vis-à-vis the Middle East. Tyler, who has twenty-five years of Middle Eastern journalism experience under his belt, writes an account of history that is unbiased. His analysis examines events from the domestic American perspective, but includes some of the local and regional Middle Eastern perspectives as well. In his prologue, Tyler establishes two main arguments that the book’s chapters support through careful analysis of each president since Harry S. Truman. Though not made explicit, Tyler establishes in his book what amounts to a presidential theory of American foreign policy.
Tyler argues first that America’s policy in the Middle East reflects the worldview of the president and, generally, nobody else. He shatters the political canards about America’s foreign policy being determined by the “Israel lobby” (or any other lobby) or by the oil companies. Instead, Tyler goes to great lengths to establish that each president’s worldview and subsequent general foreign policy goals ultimately set the tone for their respective Middle East policies, such as Jimmy Carter’s general belief in human rights and Richard Nixon’s stark anti-communism.
His second major point is that presidents strive to be unique in their approach to foreign policy and, often, they spend a great deal of time second guessing and undoing their predecessor’s policies, best exemplified by Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to reverse Harry Truman’s position and overthrow Iran’s Mohammad Mossadeq at the behest of the Anglo-Iranian oil company. In this way, he essentially proposes that U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East is a function of presidential worldview and the policies of a president’s predecessor.
According to Tyler, each president approached the Middle East the same as they would any other foreign policy issue. For the most part, the decisions made by each president reflect their respective management styles and commitment to beliefs about foreign policy rather than an immediate sense of urgency for America’s direct national interests. Readers that are accustomed to a particular version of history might find Tyler’s analysis shocking because it challenges the popular mythology surrounding several presidents. His basic argument relative to each president follows:
Dwight Eisenhower, who sought to preserve the status quo on nearly every domestic issue, attempted to do the same in the Middle East but faced significant challenges with the rise of Nasser in Egypt and Mossadeq in Iran, along with the Lebanon and Suez Crises. Eisenhower generally succeeded and the post World War II local and regional systems continued in the Middle East until the 1960’s.
Lyndon Johnson’s support for Israel in the 1967 war was at least partially a function of his reliance on the American Jewish community to maintain his progress on civil rights and to quell criticism of the Vietnam War. Johnson also had a personal sympathy for the Jewish people that stemmed directly from his personal connections to wealthy Jewish donors.
Richard Nixon, who owed little to the Jewish electorate, backed Israel in the 1973 war because he saw the Soviet Union expanding into the Middle East through its deployment of missiles in Syria and its arms shipment to Egypt. However, while Nixon flooded the region with military equipment to counter the Soviet Union, he charged Secretary of State Kissinger with the task of trying to make peace between the Arabs and Israelis following the war. His initiatives failed, however, because of his pre-occupation with Watergate (the Saturday Night Massacres occurred during the war) and his subsequent resignation shattered the confidence of Arab and Israeli leaders towards Nixon.
Jimmy Carter, filled with Christian idealism, managed to bring the Egyptians and Israelis to the negotiating table over the return of the Sinai Peninsula, but failed to develop a pragmatic response to the fall of Iran’s Shah and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan because the two countries were outside of his spiritual and intellectual comfort zones.
Ronald Reagan allowed himself to be duped by both the Israeli government and members of his own staff during the 1982 Lebanon War and the Iran-Contra scandal, respectively. Tyler writes that because of his aloof management style, Reagan was probably the most disastrous president vis-à-vis the Middle East because of his failure to want to understand the complexities of the Lebanon War, which led to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks when he decided to volunteer American troops as peacekeepers. Reagan and his administration also fueled the Iran-Iraq war through arms shipments to both countries, contributing to the loss of millions of lives in both countries.
George H.W. Bush, in his attempts to maintain the peace following the collapse of the Soviet Union, organized a successful coalition against Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. In the process, he deployed American troops to Saudi Arabia and set the pre-text for the beginning of Osama bin Laden’s first attacks against the United States. Additionally, Bush solidified his reputation for being a weak leader through his clash with Israel over the development of West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements, which he admittedly lost because of involvement by activists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Bush’s failure to hold his ground marked the first time that the “Israel lobby” truly influenced a presidential policy.
Bill Clinton, who came closer than anyone else to brokering a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was too distracted by his personal scandals to focus his attention on the impending growth of Middle Eastern terrorist organizations bent on attacking the United States. Indeed, Clinton’s responses to the Khobar towers, USS Cole, and African embassy bombings were weak and did not focus on combating al Qaeda; they merely retaliated in a manner that did not convey the level of serious attention required by the issue because of Clinton’s personal problems and domestic distractions.
In all of these cases, each president set out to have a different policy agenda than his predecessor and all, in some way, changed the landscape of the Middle East.
Despite a publication date of late 2008, Tyler does not devote much of his book to analyzing George W. Bush and his approaches to the Middle East. This is an unfortunate omission. The events of 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, failures with the Israelis and Palestinians, Bush’s personal associations, and the allegations of torture Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay reflect just a sample of Bush administration policy toward the region during his two terms. If Tyler writes a second edition of his book, he would do well to consider including an analysis of Bush’s Middle East policies. A failure to do so will put readers attempting to gain a broad historical perspective of American policies in the region at a serious disadvantage.
Tyler also seems to limit his conceptual geography of the Middle East to the land between Egypt and Iran, excluding Turkey in the north. This is significant because the Middle East is not just a geographic area; it is an identity shared by people across North and East Africa and into Central Asia. Arab and Islamic political organizations include members from these regions, and America’s relations with geographically outlying countries affect relations with countries inside of the geographic Middle East, as loosely defined by Tyler.
As the United States continues to face challenges in countries on the periphery of the Middle East, it is important that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan be included in our general conception of the Middle East because, in the minds of their citizens, they are a part of the broader Middle East culturally, historically, religiously, and, often, politically.
The final failure of omission in A World of Trouble is its nearly total oversight of Harry Truman’s Middle East policies. Truman created two major policies that shaped America’s actions throughout the Cold War and impact its current foreign policy: containment of communism and a strong relationship with Israel. Truman’s communist containment doctrine for Greece and Turkey (both on the periphery of the Middle East) provided the intellectual and practical roots for Nixon’s activist Cold War policies, which sought to counter communist expansion in the region. Truman should not be regarded as a footnote in America’s history in the region; in many ways, he was the originator of American Middle East policy and America is still living with the consequences of his decisions–particularly the decision to create an Israeli state.
Overall, Tyler’s book is a significant work of history and worthy of both scholars and casual readers alike. It is one of the few books that offer a balanced account of America’s relations with the Middle East. A World of Trouble also manages to posit a presidential theory of American foreign policy formulation, if only implicitly. This book provides historical context for anyone with a slight curiosity about why the Middle East is the way it is and why America acts the way it acts when confronted with a crisis. This book provides the benefit of hindsight, contained in 554 enjoyable and easy to read pages. Given Obama’s recent speech in Cairo
, it appears that he and his team are very familiar with the book and its messages.
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