Robert H. Ferrell

American Policy in the Middle East

It is not difficult to discern the historic factors which have brought the Middle East into its present position of “crisis area” in the foreign relations of the United States. The reasons why we have gotten from there to here, from the somnolent state of Middle Eastern affairs in, say, the year 1914 and their still sleepy condition in 1939 to the split-second enmities and antagonisms of the mid-1970s have been pointed up by events of recent history. First of all there was the rise of nationalism. Evident in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it spread slowly to the other Arabic-speaking peoples of the region. Nationalism in the Middle East has become extremely important during the last twenty-five years.