This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department's Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington's perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

From "the foremost U.S. historian of the modern Middle East" ("L.A. Times") comes a powerful argument that the global conflicts now playing out explosively in the Middle East were significantly shaped by the Cold War era.

The Cold War has been researched in minute detail and written about at great length but it remains one of the most elusive and enigmatic conflicts of modern times. With the ending of the Cold War, it is now possible to review the entire post-war period, to examine the Cold War as history. The Middle East occupies a special place in the history of the Cold War. It was critical to its birth, its life and its demise. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it became one of the major theatres of the Cold War on account of its strategic importance and its oil resources. The key to the international politics of the Middle East during the Cold War era is the relationship between external powers and local powers. Most of the existing literature on the subject focuses on the policies of the Great Powers towards the local region. The Cold War and the Middle East redresses the balance by concentrating on the policies of the local actors. It looks at the politics of the region not just from the outside in but from the inside out. The contributors to this volume are leading scholars in the field whose interests combine International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies.

Roby C Barrett casts fresh light on US foreign policy under Eisenhower and Kennedy, illuminating the struggles of two American administrations to deal with massive social, economic, and political change in an area sharply divided by regional and Cold War rivalries. With a dramatic backdrop of revolutionary Arab nationalism, Zionism, indigenous communism, teetering colonial empires, unstable traditional monarchies, oil, territorial disputes and the threat of Soviet domination of the region, this book vividly highlights the fundamental similarities between the goals and application of foreign po.

The dawn of the Cold War marked a new stage of complex U.S. foreign policy involvement in the Middle East. More recently, globalization and the region’s ongoing conflicts and political violence have led to the U.S. being more politically, economically, and militarily enmeshed – for better or worse—throughout the region. This book examines the emergence and development of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East from the early 1900s to the present. With contributions from some of the world’s leading scholars, it takes a fresh, interdisciplinary, and insightful look into the many antecedents that led to current U.S. foreign policy. Exploring the historical challenges, regional alliances, rapid political change, economic interests, domestic politics, and other sources of regional instability, this volume comprises critical analysis from Iranian, Turkish, Israeli, American, and Arab perspectives to provide a comprehensive examination of the evolution and transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. This volume is an important resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Political Science, Sociology, International Relations, Islamic, Turkish, Iranian, Arab, and Israeli Studies.