Preface

The contemporary history of the Middle East has been engulfed in unprecedented violence and war. Over the last four decades, these violent dynamics have emerged both from widening international and regional conflict and from deepening domestic fault lines between authoritarian leaders and their citizens. Furthermore, climate crises are both exacerbated by the continual environmental stresses of war and contribute to further conflict. There are many ways to tell this story, and a multitude of perspectives to take into account. This book seeks to explain the sustained turbulence by focusing on three separate, yet overlapping and reinforcing, drivers of conflict: constant foreign intervention, the ongoing Palestinian–Israeli conflict, and failed authoritarian governance.

Although the focus of this book is primarily on the geopolitical disorder of the last four decades, social and economic themes are discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, which focuses on the 2011 Uprisings. But one book cannot cover everything. I recognize that the absence here of individual voices and actors has made it harder to capture the resilience and hospitality of Middle Eastern cultures and communities one readily recognizes when one lives and travels in the region. But it is hoped that the geostrategic focus allows for a fuller accounting of the devastating impact of international and regional interventions ‐ and, especially for a Western audience, of the entanglement of the United States in contemporary Middle Eastern history – in order for them to be fully understood and critiqued.

For the purposes here, the Middle East is defined as the territory stretching from Egypt to Iran, and from Türkiye to Yemen. The question of what exactly Middle East countries have in common that allows them to be termed a “region” remains a challenging one. Robert Malley notes that while “the Middle East functions as a unified space” with ideologies, movements, and causes rapidly mobilizing support across borders, nonetheless, “one struggles to think of another region whose dynamics are as thoroughly defined by a discrete number of identifiable and all‐encompassing fault lines,”1 each with distinct roots. A region that is at once both integrated and polarized, Malley concludes, renders it ever more vulnerable to outside interventions. Local political groups constantly seek outside support, while foreign countries seek to exploit local grievances to secure their own interests.

In this sense, the core area of the Middle East constitutes a region from a security point of view, both international and regional. It is also the main area of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, which has intersected in so many ways with regional geopolitics. While seeking to avoid an overly reductionist account of such a large and varied part of the world, this book will also integrate neighboring regions – such as the North African states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco and Central Asian states, such as Afghanistan – when it is necessary to draw connections to salient issues, such as “the war on terrorism,” “political Islam,” “international law,” or “the Arab Uprisings.”

Though the history of authoritarian rule and poor governance in the Middle East is by no means unique, the key point is the extent to which a defined space known as “the Middle East” has been delimited through external interventions by foreign powers who often act with impunity. As Carl Brown long ago observed, “For roughly the last two centuries the Middle East has been more consistently and more thoroughly ensnarled in great power politics than any other part of the non‐Western world.”2 Indeed, the initial identification of a geographical place called “the Middle East” was itself a construction of foreign military and naval interests. Until the twentieth century, the term “Middle East” was virtually unknown. European imperial projects gave rise to the idea of a distinct region designated as “the Middle East,” due to its strategic location on European trade routes to the “Far East,” while its own strategic resources, especially oil, attracted increasing attention. Although today the term is widely used in the region itself, the geographical delimitation by western observers is still often accompanied by their own set of ideological assumptions. As explained by Edward Said and others, these assumptions generally shape and reduce the region to undifferentiated elements of religion or race, and represent the region as backward, inherently violent, and unchanging in relation to self‐projections of a progressive, tolerant, and dynamic “West.”3 One can recall here both President Trump’s recent description of the region as a “long blood‐stained land,” as well as his predecessor President Obama’s caution against getting involved in “conflicts that date back millennia.” Such misrepresentations tell us more about US policy debates than they do about the people living in the region. Grossly simplifying the interests and needs of Middle Easterners themselves, western misrepresentations too frequently fail to consider how external intervention and support, not least America’s own foreign policies, continue to ruin the region and structure conflicts. For Graham Fuller, this presents “a huge paradox”: on the one hand, Washington prides itself on its dominating global footprint while, on the other, fails to acknowledge the magnitude of its own role in helping to create problems and crises.4

Nonstop foreign political and military interference of course long precedes America’s dominant role, and dates back centuries, from the expansion of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century to the twentieth‐century Cold War delineation of spheres of influence. The whole history of state building in the modern Middle East, both in terms of drawing external borders and creating internal governance structures, owes a great deal to the political assumptions, designs, and interests of Britain and France specifically. After the First World War, Britain and France sought spoils of war from the defeated Ottoman Empire. Through the early 1920s, London and Paris exercised various forms of direct and indirect control over newly carved‐out colonial states. For the most part, colonial‐era borders have survived the last century. More importantly, the legacy of colonialism’s divisive sectarian policies and authoritarian political structures has also endured.

In the post–World War Two period of decolonization, colonial structures were bequeathed to new national leaders, mostly military officers. They of course had agency too. One must not fall into the trap of reducing everything to external meddling. About 70 years ago, colonial regimes were replaced by new regimes, promising political independence and economic development. Despite positioning themselves against the previous colonial administrations, military leaders in fact paid little attention to transforming the colonial governance structures they inherited into more participatory systems of government. As Roger Owen observes of both the “politically ambitious soldier” and of the conditions that marked the economics and politics of the decolonization process: “in a Middle East struggling to develop its own resources while also struggling to defend itself from external threat, it was perhaps inevitable that the goals of national security, self‐defense, and rapid industrialization should take precedence over those of political pluralism and individual rights.”5 These authoritarian systems of control were further reinforced during the Cold War which, from the start, placed the strategic location of the Middle East into American crosshairs.

One must, of course, be careful not to assume that US foreign policy is defined by a single approach or grand strategy, nor that there is one unified national interest to secure. Nonetheless, the significance of the Middle East region to US foreign policy (and vice versa) is clear, perhaps illustrated most sharply by the mounting number of American presidential doctrines, from Truman to Bush, that have concerned direct interference in the Middle East.6 Historically, these doctrines aimed to secure what have been referred to as “the holy trinity” of American interests: containing Soviet influence; securing access to oil; and, protecting Israel.7 Each of these objectives was impacted greatly by the tumult of 1979 when, in the words of David Lesch, “the Middle East, indeed, the world, had changed.”8

Why 1979?

Chronologically, this book charts the contemporary history of the Middle East from the watershed year, 1979. As noted by other volumes in this series, the dramatic events of this one year must be seen as part of broader global shifts that include the global transformations wrought by Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Deng Xiaoping in China. For the Middle East, the year proved especially momentous, starting with the toppling of the American‐backed Shah of Iran and the return of the dissident religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in February 1979. America was shocked and alarmed by the prospect of religious extremists replacing the Shah, who had for decades proved an important ally. Events unfolding throughout the year in neighboring Afghanistan sharpened America’s focus on the...