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Understanding the limits of power: America's Middle East experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2010

MAXIMILIAN TERHALLE
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Abstract

The main thread of this review article is to identify the reasons of how to account for the trajectory of American power in the region. Leaving behind the vast amount of highly politicised and hastily compiled volumes of recent years (notwithstanding valuable exceptions), the monographs composed by Lawrence Freedman, Trita Parsi and Oliver Roy attempt to subtly disentangle the intricacies of US involvement in the region from highly distinct perspectives. One caveat for International Relations theorists is that none of the aforementioned authors intends to provide theoretical frameworks for his examination. However, since IR theory has damagingly neglected history in the last decades, the works under review here, at least in part, compensate for this disciplinary and intellectual failure.

In conclusion, Freedman's in-depth approach as a diplomatic historian, with its underlying reference to the various traditions in US foreign policy thinking, is most illuminating, while Parsi's contestable account focuses too narrowly on the Iran-Israel relationship. Roy's explications fail to show how and why the ‘ideological’ element in US foreign policy came to carry exceedingly more weight after 2001 than it did in the 1990s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 631 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

1 Roy, Politics, p. 7.

2 Ibid., p. 39.

3 Ibid., p. 3.

4 Ibid., p. 4.

5 Ibid., pp. 27–48.

6 Ibid., p. 34.

7 Ibid., p. 109.

8 Anoushiravan Ehteshami, ‘The Middle East Between Ideology and Geopolitics’, in Mary Buckley and Robert Singh (eds), The Bush Doctrine and the War in Terrorism (London: Routledge 2006), pp. 104–20.; Vali Nasr, ‘When the Shiites Rise’, in Foreign Affairs, 85:4 (2006), pp. 58–74.

9 Roy, Politics, p. 109.

10 Ibid., p. 116.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., p. 117.

13 Ibid.

14 Maximilian Terhalle, ‘Are the Shia Rising?’ in Middle East Policy, 14:2 (2007), pp. 69–83.

15 Roy, Politics, p. 119.

16 See, for example, Robert Allison, ‘Postscript: Americans and the Muslim World – First Encounters’, in David W. Lesch (ed.), The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment (Boulder: Westview Press 2003), pp. 491–502.

17 Parsi, Alliance, p. xii.

18 Key works in comparative (domestic) politics and international relations that are not mentioned include (but are not limited to) the following: Owen, Roger, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge 2000); Zubaida, Sami, Islam, the People & the State (London: I.B. Tauris 1995); Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005); Louise Fawcett (ed.), International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005); L. Carl Brown (ed.), Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers (London: I.B. Tauris 2001).

19 Parsi, Alliance, p. 11.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 90.

22 Ibid., pp. 92, 94.

23 Ibid., p. 95.

24 Ibid., p. 105.

25 Ibid., p. 97.

26 See, for example, Gregory Gause, ‘The International Politics of the Gulf’, in Fawcett, International Relations, pp. 263–81. A second example is Parsi's assertion that when invading Kuwait ‘Saddam killed Pan-Arabism’ (p. 148). A third is his statement that ‘[b]y offering the GCC states bilateral security deals, Washington pre-empted a common Persian Gulf security arrangement and managed to continue Iran's exclusion from regional decision-making’ (p. 147).

27 Parsi, Alliance, p. 263.

28 Ibid., p. 139.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., p. 158.

31 Ibid., p. 199, 198.

32 Ibid., p. 262.

33 Ibid., p. 283.

34 Roger Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984).

35 Parsi, Alliance, p. 291, fn 10.

36 Gerd Nonneman, Analyzing Middle East Foreign Policies and the Relationship with Europe (London: Routledge 2005), pp. 6–17; Fawcett, International Relations, pp. 173–93.

37 Freedman, Choice, p. xxv.

38 Ibid., p. xxvi (both quotes).

39 Ibid., p. 211.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., p. 246.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., p. 247.

44 Ibid., pp. 235, 379–80.

45 Gordon Craig and Alexander George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press 1995), p. 269.

46 Freedman, Choice, p. 253.

47 Ibid., p. 17.

48 Ibid., p. 398.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., p. 401.

51 Ibid., p. 406.

52 Ibid., p. 508.

53 Ibid., pp. 403–4.

54 Ibid., p. 409.

55 Ibid., p. 508.

56 Ibid., p. 417.

57 Ibid., pp. xxiii, 508.

58 Ibid., p. 505.

59 Ibid., p. 506.

60 Ibid., pp. 506–7.

61 Ibid., p. 507.

62 Edward Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Houndsmills: Palgrave 2001), pp. 84–8. Though, for a statesman to draw from a vision is a widely acknowledged necessity. See Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster 1994), p. 836.