As discussed in the previous article in this series, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington focused America’s attention on the wider Middle East – Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and to some extent Turkey – in addition of course to the Arab world.
It is a mistake to think that America only came to the wider Middle East after World War II, determined to inherit the British Empire’s possessions in the region, and with that entering into strategic transactions with key powers such as the House of Saud by which it offered protection in return for a highly privileged position for America, and its companies, in extracting and distributing Saudi oil.
This is only part of the story, since America had come to the region much earlier than that.
Since the early 19th century, and for at least three decades afterwards, America had been closely watching the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean because of the threat that the so-called Barbary regimes (today’s Maghreb region) posed to American commercial shipping in the South Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
Indeed, it was in the Southern Mediterranean that America’s navy had its first real operations, trying to destroy the pirating fleets of several of the semi-city states in today’s Maghreb. These successive American expeditions in the Mediterranean were of crucial importance to America’s then nascent military power and to its then expanding maritime commercial presence in the world that had commanded the attention of its highest executives, including presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Religion also brought America to the Eastern Mediterranean. In the first third of the 19th century, American pastors primarily from Episcopalian and Presbyterian backgrounds found immense success in New England states in raising funds for organising missionary expeditions to the Middle East, especially to the Levant.
The incentive was largely to propagate Christianity and to fulfill America’s vision of itself as the “city on the hill” and “the light of the nations” that would bring goodness to the world, especially to nations that, in a certain American perception, had been lurking for ages in moral and intellectual darkness.
Indeed, these missionary campaigns were the foundations upon which key American institutions in the region, such as the American universities in Beirut and Cairo, were later created.
But America’s internal problems, from the war with Britain in the early 19th century to the expansion of the republic towards the West and then the Civil War, the reconstruction of the south after that, and then the wave of booms and busts in the last third of the 19th century, consumed its attention and channelled the country’s efforts.
America, often by design and often by default, isolated itself behind the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for almost seven decades until the first quarter of the 20th century. But whenever America ventured seriously abroad, going beyond savouring the luxuries of London, Paris, Vienna, and Rome, it was almost always drawn to the Middle East.
As a result, America’s return to the Arab world and the Middle East after World War II was far from being a case of exploring the unknown.
Indeed, America came to the wider Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s with quite strongly formed views on the region. These ranged between two opposites. The first views were largely negative, seeing the Arab world and the wider Middle East as having a false religious and moral frame of reference – an important theme in a country in which Christianity, and a quite conservative and often assertive form of the religion at that, has always had a strong shaping power.
As a result, from this perspective America came to the region aiming, in the American understanding, to enlighten it.
The second set of views were quite romantic. Interestingly, they were largely held by employees of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), America’s first field operatives in the region, who to a large extent shaped America’s presence in the region in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although most of those OSS and CIA officers drew on English and Orientalist perceptions of the East and had firsthand experiences that were often reminiscent of those of mediaeval European travellers in the Orient, the most influential of them saw the region through idealised lenses.
Even when they organised coups and tried to overthrow regimes, their thinking was often rooted in the belief that the Arab world and the wider Middle East had the potential for immense goodness that they only needed to steer towards – with the right course, they believed, being of course aligned with the interests of the US in the region.
These old frames of reference were vividly present in the thinking that prevailed in key circles of power in America, and they designed the country’s strategy in and for the wider Middle East after 9/11.
As the next article in this series will show, the results included some of the most ambitious and problematic socio-political projects the region has witnessed in its modern history.
* The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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