American involvement in the Middle East has dominated US foreign policy since at least the Iranian Revolution of 1979. But, as American-Israeli scholar Michael Oren writes in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present,” US involvement in the Middle East is long and complex, dating from literally the founding of the republic.
Early American impressions of the Orient, as the region was then known (the term Middle East would be coined by naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1902), were highly positive and largely defined by their reading of the Bible and “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” Oren introduces us to the intrepid John Ledyard, the late eighteenth century America who was the first of his countrymen to explore the region, which many Americans held at mythic, exotic, and romantic.
A naturally inquisitive and trading people, Americans aggressively sought access to the trading ports of the eastern Mediterranean immediately after gaining independence in 1783. The scourge of all Mediterranean trade, the Barbary pirates, quickly met these mostly New England traders. For over thirty years, the United States battled pirates from Algiers, Tunis, and Tangiers. Oren writes that during the course of the conflict some 35 American ships were captured and over 700 American sailors were held for ransom or sold into slavery. The American response was fitful and indecisive. On the one hand, capitulating to ransom demands was humiliating. On the other hand, the cost of building a navy large enough and capable enough of snuffing out the threat was prohibitive. Oren estimates that ransom and bounty payments during the Jefferson administration often amounted to as much as 20% of US income. For all of American bravado today with the line “To the shores of Tripoli” in the US Marine Corps Hymn, Oren makes it clear that the American war along the shores of North Africa in the early nineteenth century were at best a favorable draw.
Shortly after the conflict with the Barbary pirates was settled around 1820, a new variety of American began to appear along the shores of the Levant: missionaries and tourists. In the years before the US Civil War, thousands of Americans poured into the Holy Lands looking for souls to save and sights to see. Indeed, after Britain, Americans were the most numerous visitors to the region and the US State Department worked to establish a vast web of consulates to support and protect them. Beginning with the early missionaries Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, American missionary and aid societies sent scores of volunteers to the region, despite a sobering 35% casualty rate from disease, according to Oren. Many were “restorationists,” evangelical Christians committed to recruiting Jews to return to Palestine over a century before the founding of Israel.
For most early missionaries and Holy Land tourists, their time in the Middle East was a colossal let down. “Without exception,” Oren writes, “Americans returned from their Middle Eastern journeys bereft of any sense of reverie or illusion.” Indeed, American visitors, from evangelical ministers to cultural figures, such as novelist Herman Melville, left the Holy Lands disgusted by the barrenness, poverty, bigotry, and filth they witnessed. But yet they kept coming. American tourism in the Middle East exploded after the Civil War and included such luminaries as former secretary of state William Seward, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, and former president Ulysses Grant. Perhaps most influential of all, Mark Twain toured Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Cairo in 1867. His biting travelogue, describing the trip in colorful, deprecating detail, was published as “The Innocents Abroad” and made him a fortune – and famous.
Evangelical missionaries continued to largely define the American presence in the region. “America’s Palestine mania would deepen in the decades after the Civil War,” Oren writes, “and, with it, the romance of Jewish restoration.” In the single decade between 1885 and 1895 the budget for missionary institutions in the Middle East expanded sevenfold. Evangelicals had, by the turn of the century, established over 400 schools and nine colleges with a total enrollment of over 20,000 students and also supported nine hospitals. The only thing the American missionaries were short of was converts to the faith. Rather, according to Oren, it was they who were being converted as those “who ventured to the Middle East in order to convert Arabs … were eventually converted to Arabism.”
In one of the more remarkable side stories in his sweeping narrative, Oren tells how a motley collection of both Union and Confederate veteran officers served the khedive of Egypt in the years after the Civil War to modernize the Egyptian army and to expand Egyptian suzerainty into Sudan and Uganda. It is a striking chapter in what might be called American special operations in the Middle East that I had never heard before.
By the time of the First World War, American missionaries had established a wide and influential foundation across the greater Middle East based on philanthropic endeavors in education and humanitarian assistance. The American presence was so widespread (and vulnerable) that the Wilson administration refrained from declaring war on Turkey in 1917 when it entered the war against Germany, so deep were fears of Turkish atrocities against helpless American missionaries and their long-entrenched evangelical institutions. The net result was that the US was left out of the scramble to redraw the map of the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a process that Oren calls “between bad and execrable” and “an unqualified failure.”
For much of the interwar period Washington pursued a largely hands-off approach to the Middle East, Oren says, viewing the region as primarily the political responsibility of the British while maintaining a strict neutrality concerning the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a policy increasingly resisted by Arabists in the State Department, many of them the sons of Middle East missionaries. Meanwhile, the discovery of significant oil deposits on the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s dramatically altered the strategic importance of that desolate and long ignored region. “By 1939,” Oren writes, “Saudi wells were spewing an impressive five million barrels per year and had become a tangible, indisputable American interest.” No longer would the interests and protection of Christian missionaries define US foreign policy toward the Middle East.
In contrast to its retreat into isolationism after the First World War, the US emerged from the Second World War the preponderant power in the Middle East and would walk a tightrope between competing interests. “The advent of the Cold War, escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the deepening of America’s dependence on Arab oil gave rise to Gordian questions,” Oren writes. The final 100 pages of the book is a whirlwind tour of familiar events in the Middle East, many of them involving the nascent state of Israel: the creation of Israel in 1948, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Six Days War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and bloody Arab terrorism targeting the West throughout the 1970s and 80s. Indeed, America’s increasingly close relationship with the Jewish state plays the predominant role in the latter part of Oren’s lengthy narrative. Stymying Soviet influence in the region while maintaining access to oil remained imperatives, but frequently subordinated to the support of Israel.
In closing, Oren presents an admirably objective and well-researched narrative of American involvement in the Middle East over the past 250 years. I was already well familiar with the events since the Second World War and thus found the early accounts involving the Barbary pirates and nineteenth century missionaries to be the most informative and satisfying. I’m sure that “Power, Faith, and Fantasy” will appeal to a broad audience and is highly recommended to readers at all levels of experience with the Middle East.
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