The United States And The Middle East

The role of the Middle East has been very crucial to the United States, especially after WWII. The U.S. had three strategic goals in the Middle East and consistently followed them throughout various events that unfolded in the region. First, with the emergence of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the U.S., policymakers began to recognize the importance of the Middle East as a strategic area in containing Soviet influence. This also coincides with the U.S. becoming increasingly wary of Arab nationalism and the threat it posed to U.S. influence. Secondly, the emergence of the new Israeli state in 1948 further deepened U.S. policy and involvement in the region while also creating friction between the U.S. and Arab states which were

“The United States recognizes the provisional Government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.” These are the words of President Harry Truman from a speech he gave shortly after Israel became a recognized nation in 1948. Consequently, the political leaders of the United States have brought America on a rough journey to the current state of foreign policy and relationship with Israel. Since 1948, the United States’ active position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen very little change or progress towards achieving settlement between these two nationalistic states. In the last 65 years, the majority of U.S. presidents repeated mistakes made by their predecessors in office, and this in turn has had little

For the United States, the Gulf region remains one of the most geo-strategically important locations in the world for diplomatic, intelligence cooperation, and business opportunities such as hydrocarbons and arms. This strategic cooperation has provided the region some stability, particularly with the rise of Iran and the Shi’a crescent and the chaotic outcome of the war in Iraq. The council members have also relied on the United State to fend off some of the domestic challenges to the existing regimes that are both internally and regionally rooted.

President Obama stated in his Anti-Terror Strategy address, "We continue to face a terrorist threat. We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11, and that remains true today” (Obama).The Middle East today is composed of very complicated religious tensions, unstable states, and rising terrorist organizations. The collapse of central governments and the rise of powerful non-state actors breed problems that foreign powers and the world’s only superpower, simply should begin to address. Many argue that the involvement in the Middle East is not our problem and that it will only cause our national debt to increase. As human beings we must began to realize the crimes against humanity occurring in the region and ask ourselves one question, can we truly turn a blind eye to the hundreds of innocent people dying and at what cost? The United States of America must get involved in the Middle East to ensure justice is achieved and maintained. Our interference will decrease the chances of terrorist attacking U.S. soil, and our military involvement will save the lives of many innocent citizens caught up in the turmoil. The United States must protect its interests and allies in the region. America stands for freedom, justice, and dignity; we must take a stand to defend ourselves and those in need, if we truly want to uphold the

In his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington warns against developing “permanent alliances” with foreign countries, arguing that this entanglement leads to unnecessary complication (Washington). Of course, Washington’s warning is somewhat grounded in the fact that the United States was a young country that could not handle excessive participation in foreign affairs. Nevertheless, it is important to pay some attention to Washington’s words. Since 1900, the United States has executed more than two hundred military interventions. Furthermore, sixteen of these are marked as “attempts at nation building” (Pei and Kasper 2003). Since 1900, the United States has taken on a habit of intervening in foreign countries with the intention of maintaining peace. However, as indicated by Pei and Kasper, success in improving these nations is rarely the case. Of the aforementioned sixteen efforts, democracy was preserved in only four cases. This low success rate proves that building a nation is an inherently complicated – and difficult – process that should only be executed when the recipients truly want help.

The United States and the Western Coalition has long looked at the Middle East as an asset with little risk high reward potential. They have all looked at them as high reward low risk a region that in contrast, has an abundance of natural resources in particular oil with very underwhelming population. Even if they had a product that could reach out and touch the masses the internal struggles and lack of cohesion and structure to get out of the region. Both the United States and Western coalition watched the struggles intervened when necessary and when a reward could reaped even if it was a better deal on the oil prices to actual occupation of land. The intervention, however did began to elevate and inflate the

Iran and the United States are frigid bedfellows indeed. For the last thirty-seven years, these two cultures dogmatically opposed each other philosophically and theologically. To this day, the two countries monitor the other’s actions with suspicion and disdain. The United States accuses Iran’s Islamic theocracy of state sponsored terrorism and proliferation of nuclear materials with the intent of use against Israel. Iran by contrast sees the United States as an aggressive interloper driven by a lust for fossil fuel hegemony and diametrically opposed to Iran’s own national interests. Truly a match made in heaven.

The US foreign policy towards the Middle East can be divided into three major epochs the first during the Cold War. Second after the Cold War till the 9/11 event and the third epoch is after the 9/11. During the Cold War the Containment Policy influenced the United States foreign policy in the Middle East. The three main concerns in the Middle East for the United States were oil, protecting Israel, and containing communism made the United States’ foreign policy in the region defensive, reactive, and pragmatic. The United States sought peace and stability within the Middle East region in order to prevent Middle Eastern countries from taking sides between the two superpowers. Preventing war was essential to Containment Policy. After the end

Conflict over energy resources—and the wealth and power they create—has become an increasingly prominent feature for geopolitics particularly in the Middle East . The discovery of oil in the late nineteenth century added a dimension to the region as major outside states powers employed military force to protect their newly acquired interests in the Middle East. The U.S.’s efforts to secure the flow of oil have led to ever increasing involvement in the Middle East region’s political affairs and ongoing power struggles. By the end of the twentieth century, safeguarding the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf had become one of the most important functions of the U.S. military establishment. The close relationship between the United States and the Saudi royal family was formed in the final months of World War II, when U.S. leaders sought to ensure preferential access to Saudi petroleum. The U.S. link with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region has demonstrated to be greatly beneficial to both parties, yet it has also led to ever deepening U.S. involvement in regional politics.

Over the past decade, the Middle East has proven to be a complex quandary that the United States is ultimately unequipped to handle. Before the U.S. can possibly pacify the region, it must first work to conquer obstacles domestically. The U.S. should also recognize the source of conflict in the Middle East and use this knowledge in the future as a foundation for a solution to amity. Thus, the approach that the United States should employ in regards to the Middle East is to gradually pull out and become a more self-sustaining nation. However, the U.S. should actively participate in global meetings with other countries as well. This proposal will prove to be the most advantageous solution for both the U.S. and the Middle East.

The United States has various relationships with the world, some more complicated than others. One thing this nation has that is better than most countries is the fact that we are a very culturally diverse society, which can be beneficial. In relation to others, the U.S. is different from other nations by our diverse cultures, religions and just like many others, we have issues we come face to every day. Americans deal with diversity as they work closely with other cultures by putting their differences aside to achieve something. We have a society that is based more along a judeo christian mentality and structure versus more of other predominent religious beliefs.

December 10, 2010 witnessed the inception of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of both violent and nonviolent protests and demonstrations in the Arab world that began in Tunisia. While the wave of initial revolutions and protests quelled by mid-2012, other large-scale conflicts in the Middle East intensified, such as the Yemeni and Libyan crises. In Syria, the unrest of the Arab Spring escalated to armed conflict after President Bashar al-Assad’s regime violently repressed protests calling for his removal. Beginning in March 2011, the Syrian Civil War is currently being fought by the following factions: the Syrian Government and its supporters, an alliance of Syrian Arab rebel groups, the Syrian Democratic Forces, Salafi jihadist groups, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). These factions also receive substantial support from foreign nations (primarily the US and Russia, who back the rebels and Assad, respectively), causing the conflict to be labeled a “proxy war.” Additionally, the civil war has caused a refugee crisis. Since 2011, millions of Syrians have fled from their country sought asylum in other countries. In 2016, the United Nations identified 13.5 million Syrians as requiring humanitarian assistance. Almost million Syrians have requested asylum in countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and those in the European Union. According to the UN Refugee Agency, in 2016, various nations have pledged to permanently

The cover page of this TIME magazine, an issue of 1979 invoked purely the orientalist idea of the Middle East. It represented the faulty equation of Islam= Muslim= Arab= terrorist or religious fanatics.

Syrian civil war started in 2011 was the outcome of the opposition against the President Bashar al-Assad regime. The uprising emerged as a response to the Arab spring movement that lead to regime change in Tunisia and subsequently turned into mass unrest rooted into the discontent with long-term dictatorship and poor economic situation in the country (Manfreda, n.d.). The number of Syrian citizens killed in the civil war reached 140000 since March 2011 (SBS 2014). The European Commission (2014, 2) reports approximately 9.3 million civilians “in need for humanitarian assistance”. The scale of armed rebellion between government and opposition that lead to an increasing number of casualties among civilians did not remain unnoticed by the

The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Middle East for decades and they’ve had various reasons for being there, whether it was to wage war or to prevent outside influence that would undermine their own influence in the region, it always seemed to revolve around one thing: oil. As we all know, oil is a very profitable resource and it’s a huge part of many nations’ economies and because this is the case many wars are fought over this black liquid. The U.S. is no different in that they did just about anything to maintain their access to Middle East oil. As a result, United States actions in the Middle East today has been formed through the decades long desire for their oil.