Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967

by Matthew F. Jacobs

Overview

As its interests have become deeply tied to the Middle East, the United States has long sought to develop a usable understanding of the people, politics, and cultures of the region. In Imagining the Middle East, Matthew Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the region have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there.

Jacobs examines the ways in which an informal network of academic, business, government, and media specialists interpreted and shared their perceptions of the Middle East from the end of World War I through the late 1960s. During that period, Jacobs argues, members of this network imagined the Middle East as a region defined by certain common characteristics--religion, mass politics, underdevelopment, and an escalating Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and as a place that might be transformed through U.S. involvement. Thus, the ways in which specialists and policymakers imagined the Middle East of the past or present came to justify policies designed to create an imagined Middle East of the future. Jacobs demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807869314
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/12/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Matthew F. Jacobs is associate professor of history at the University of Florida.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 The Task … Falls to the Area Specialists 23

National Interests, Knowledge Production, and the Emergence of an Informal Network

2 Tne All-Pervading Influence of the Muslim Faith 55

The Perils and Promise of Political Islam

3 A New Amalgam of Interests, Religion, Propaganda, and Mobs 95

Interpretations of Secular Mass Politics

4 What Modernization Requires of the Arabs … Is Their De-Arabization 140

Imagining a Transformed Middle East

5 A Profound and Growing Disturbance … Which May Last for Decades 187

The Arab-Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Limits of the Network

Epilogue 235

Notes 249

Bibliography 287

Index 307

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A provocative book full of extraordinary archival research, Imagining the Middle East is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the background to America's collision with radical Islam during the last quarter of the twentieth century.—Douglas Little, Clark University, author of American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945



Jacobs takes a novel, compelling approach to the broad American experience in the Middle East during the formative years of U.S. national involvement there. This book makes a major contribution to the growing literature on the history of U.S. official and non-official interaction with the Middle East in the middle twentieth century.—Peter Hahn, professor of history, The Ohio State University

Editorial Reviews

A competent book describing the various groups and individuals that sought to shape American perceptions of and policies in the Middle East from the end of World War I to just after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.—Middle East Journal



An important book on the origins and evolution of how educated and influential Americans have understood the Middle East. . . . An invaluable account of the evolution of American thought about that area, thereby offering at least a fleeting hope that better-informed decisions might lie in our future.—Journal of American Studies

From the Publisher