Imagining the Middle East by Jacobs Matthew F.;

Author:Jacobs, Matthew F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Pursuing Transformation While Controlling Revolutionary Change

The prospect of revolutionary change meshed nicely with the American sense of mission in the Middle East, but members of the network and U.S. policymakers believed that a variety of global concerns forced them to find some way to try at least to control the change. The overall importance of the region and its resources to the global arena was reason enough for the United States to attempt to intervene, as Middle Eastern oil and trade routes would be crucial to the rapid postwar international economic recovery that U.S. policymakers desired. The process of decolonization also promised further instability that might be limited or prevented if the United States could somehow assist newly independent states in the region to become economically and politically viable. Finally, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union increased after World War II, policymakers and members of the network became more concerned that an unstable Middle East provided fertile ground for Soviet involvement. For all of these reasons, maintaining good relations with the countries and peoples of the Middle East meant dealing in some manner with the issue of revolutionary change.

Analysts focused much of their attention on the complicated objective of how the United States might pursue change throughout the Middle East while at the same time ensuring political and ultimately social stability and order. Doing so would not be easy, as any attempt to promote moderate reform necessarily carried with it the possibility of unleashing uncontrollable change. The participants in a Near East chiefs of mission conference in 1950 posed the question clearly. “The problem,” they stated, “is to introduce into Near Eastern political and social systems a compelling degree of liberal thought and desire for social justice without forcing a too rapid change of the existing order which might create an opportunity for communism to develop rapidly.”33

Policymakers and specialists alike drew on deeply ingrained notions of American exceptionalism, magnanimity, and moral superiority as they imagined their country’s playing a transformational role in the Middle East. According to these arguments, the United States had a long history of beneficent involvement in the region. Secretary of State Cordell Hull noted in 1942 that, because of “a century of American missionary, educational and philanthropic efforts that have never been tarnished by any material motives or interests,” the United States held “a unique position in the Near East” and enjoyed “widespread goodwill” throughout the region. Similarly, when the chiefs of mission of four U.S. legations in the Middle East met with President Truman in November 1945, they argued that the United States’ “moral leadership” was internationally recognized. People in the Middle East and around the world were waiting for Americans to decide if they were “going to follow through after their great victory or leave the field.”34

Such statements also reflected uncertainty about what principles should guide the United States as it simultaneously sought to promote transformation and control change. It was clear to network members that the United States should pursue some change to protect its own interests in the region.

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