The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the Middle East

Takeyh (senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations) was a senior advisor on Iran at the Department of State and has written and testified extensively on Middle East affairs. Simon (senior fellow, Middle East Inst.) has held numerous expert foreign affairs positions, including one year as White House senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. Here the authors argue that U.S. policy in the Middle East, from the formative years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Gulf War, was successful overall in securing American interests, usually with the overt objective of containing Soviet influence, and that U.S. tactics even had a stabilizing effect on the region. It is true that American diplomacy in the Middle East during the Cold War years consisted of constant negotiation among a complex web of competing interests. Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism in the late 1950s was, for instance, poised to threaten U.S. economic interest, while at the same time, Nasser himself was a potential anticommunist ally. As a whole, it is tempting to join the authors in seeing a success story for an imperial power in a postcolonial world. Readers might do well, however, to contrast this positive view with one that presents the United States as a destabilizing influence in the region, such as Rashid Khalidi's Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East.