What is America's Relationship to the Middle East?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

Every generation of American will have a distinct memory of their country's involvement in the Middle East. From today's war in Gaza back to the war in Iraq, the Gulf War, and that's just the last 30 years.

America has often inserted itself into the politics and the conflicts within the region. But why? In this episode, I want to find out why it cares and what it has to gain. As I ask, what is America's relationship to the Middle East?

Welcome to America A History Podcast.

I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today.

s Then the storm, released in: 2024

And there are links to that in the show notes as well. For anyone who wants to go and buy the book, welcome to the podcast. Melanie McAllister, thank you.

Melani McAlister: 00:01:25

It's great to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:26

Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me for this. And it's one of those topics that I think is probably long overdue on this podcast.

So I think it's about time that we sort of jump into this and start understanding kind of what America's kind of relationship is to the Middle east and how it's maybe evolved over the years as well. So I wonder if we could just start with a bit of a 101 on when the US's involvement in the Middle east really began.

Melani McAlister: 00:01:58

Well, it began a long time ago.

We could go back to the very early days of the American Republic or to the 19th century and see all sorts of ways that Americans got invested in the Middle east as the Holy Land, or they had kind of an exotic interest in the Middle east like Europeans did, a kind of Orientalism. But I'd like to start with my own time period, really, and look at how the Middle east becomes important.

Right after World War II, the US had already begun thinking about the fact that there was so much oil in the Middle east and that that was going to be strategically important.

But after World War II, it also becomes clear that the United States will emerge as one of two hegemons globally, along with the Soviet Union, as the European empires are decolonizing and the European empires are retreating.

So the fact that the United States now knows that it needs to sort of look around and figure out how it's Going to play a global organizing role leads to a number of investments, primary investments in the Middle east, and they evolve over time.

first, but ultimately by the: 1970

The US is trying to make allies with oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and they do so.

The US is also really trying to establish some complex relationships between global corporations like Aramco and American foreign policy so that keeping oil at a low price for everyone is part major goal for the United States. The second is more emotional I guess, or strategic in that the US decides to make the base of its investment in the region around allies.

So after the Vietnam War, the US doesn't want to be going in and fighting every time it sees itself as having an interest. And so the US begins to cultivate major regional allies in the, of the Middle East.

the overthrow of the Shah in: 1979

And then the third investment in the region really is because of its strategic location. That's to say the Middle east is, I mean, it depends on where you look.

But the Middle east really is in the middle of a lot of different things and Russia is very close. That really matters in terms of how the United thinks, the US thinks about the strategic value of the Middle East.

know and played a role in the: 1967

And if you look at a map of the Middle east, you really see how the key parts of the Middle east are really almost an island, not quite an island, but almost an island in a sea. A range of different seas that link it to the rest of the world, link it directly to Europe, directly to the Soviet Union, directly to Africa.

And so the fact that the Middle east is so central and so strategically located also matters in terms of why the United States is invested.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:36

One thing that has been a particular point of discussion in recent months, particularly in the lead up to the, the US election has been the US's stance on Israel in, in Gaza and, and, and you know, the conflict in, in Iran as well, or with Iran, I guess. Why does the US need to insert itself into the, you know, Israeli Gaza conflicts and anything else that Israel have been doing. Is it purely politics?

Melani McAlister: 00:06:07

No, the US relationship with Israel is more complicated than that. Definitely.

The US policymakers have cultivated Israel as an ally, as a strategic ally country that the US cultivates military relationships with economic relationships in the same way that it might cultivate other allies for instrumental reasons.

But the American public has been invested in Israel for different reasons and has many more emotional or cultural investments in Israel than most other countries of the world. So the United States has a constituency of people, American evangelicals, who are deeply invested in Israel for religious reasons.

They see Israel as the site of God's action in the world, both historically and in the future. At the end times, they believe that God has chosen Jews as his chosen people and Israel as their instruments.

So there's a very strong theological investment in Israel. Evangelicals also get invested in Israel because there's a set of institutions that try to keep them invested.

So tours to Israel by American Christians, including evangelicals, but also Catholics and mainline Protestants, are a major source of American emotional investment in Israel.

They go, they see, they're told how wonderful Israel is, they see how beautiful it is, they get a very one sided description of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and they come home, talk to their churches about that and kind of cultivate that relationship in a more mundane set of ways, like here are my pictures from my trip, I'll do a slideshow, I'll talk to the church and people will feel that sense of connection to Israel as an ally and as a sacred space. Of course, American Jews have been historically quite close to Israel. They're a much smaller population.

But for many, many years, the large part of the American Jewish community has both raised money and has been a source of political investment in Israel, political and cultural investment, that sense of again, a kind of meaningfulness of Israel outside its instrumental value.

And at times when Israel has been under criticism, both American evangelicals and American Jews have been there to stand back, kind of hold back major critiques of Israel, try to stop that.

But I will say also about American Jews, that American Jews have also been at the forefront of different forms of critique of Israel, from anti Zionist movements in the middle part of the century to today, when American Jews are very active in the critique of Israel's policies in Gaza. So no one group is uniform, and certainly that's true of American Jews.

But that sense that Israel matters more than other countries, more than for its usefulness is paralleled probably only by a certain kind of attitude about England that many people have about the United Kingdom or England in specific, that this is a kind of country that people care about more than just for strategic or political reasons. But Israel's is sanctified in a different way.

Liam Heffernan: 00:09:18

But for a country that I believe there's a constitutional separation between church and state. You know, America are not supposed to be a religious country.

It's, it seems quite odd to me that they're willing to create these kind of allies on what feels like quite religious grounds.

Melani McAlister: 00:09:40

Oh no.

I mean, I think that the separation of church and state, the establishment clause forbids the government from supporting particular religions or requiring particular religions as being state sponsored. What it does not prevent is religious actors from trying to influence the state.

So the state cannot have a state church, it cannot theoretically give money to churches, although in certain ways it still does. But religious actors have been from the beginning important political participants in the United States.

And the public sphere has never been free of religion at all. And nor does the Constitution require that. It requires that religious actors can say we want to support Israel because we believe God loves Israel.

But the US State cannot take a position that the evangelical church shall be writing the laws of the US relationship with Israel or it can't be institutionalized in that way. But in practice there's a great deal of influence of religion.

As you know, the United States is one of the most, if not the most religious country in the west between Europe and the United States and Canada in terms of ordinary day to day life, more people claim religion and claim religion is as important than almost any other country in the, in Europe or North America.

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:01

Yeah, yeah.

And I, I wonder then on a slightly more global scale, when we look at the sort of ties that the US is, is creating in the Middle east itself, is there any sort of conflict here in terms of the relationships that maybe to its other kind of organizations like NATO, you know, it has the North America sort of trade, you know, agreement. There's all of these different kind of agreements and political allegiances around the world that the US likes to be as central to as possible.

How does the Middle east kind of fit into that or maybe challenge that?

Melani McAlister: 00:11:40

Well, the United States has, you see that tension between going it alone and being primary actor and searching for coalition a number of places in recent years in conflicts in the Middle East.

aq War, the first Gulf War in: 1991

The same with the Iraq war, it was very important for American policymakers that they have other coalition partners who sent troops or who supported the war, even though this was clearly an American war. That's the ideal from the policymaker's perspective, to have a coalition with one member more equal than others, that always being the United States.

That's the dream, and that's what the UN Is in some ways at times as well, certainly the Security Council.

I think that that tension between coalition and unilateral action is there in American policy in the Middle East, I think, especially because of the various complexities of both trying to be allies with Israel, for example, and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries and Egypt, all of which have very complicated relationships with Israel, leads to wanting to set up some kind of sense that this is a.

This is a broad coalition intervening in Iraq, for example, when Iraq was a very important power, one that a lot of people didn't like, Saddam Hussein in the region. But also it was problematic to go in and invade and try to change the regime of an Arab country without other Arab countries supporting it.

They understood that this would be deeply problematic, and so they brought people on board.

But I think that in general, what we see, and I certainly think we're seeing this with the Israel Gaza war, is that the United States has been willing and is willing to take a lot of risks on behalf of being an ally to Israel, and that that happens in ways that sometimes seem, to me at least, to defy kind of traditional rational choice policymaking.

I think that Biden's relationship with Israel during this recent war and the ensuing genocide has been crafted for reasons that don't have to do with just basic American strategy. They have to do with Biden and his administration also being deeply invested politically and emotionally in this alliance with Israel.

Liam Heffernan: 00:14:22

Yeah. One thing that's really struck me is that foreign policy doesn't tend to be a huge issue for American voters.

And yet the war in Gaza has been a very controversial event, and it's been very divisive. And I wonder, what is it about this that's really touched a nerve of the American public?

Melani McAlister: 00:14:43

Yeah.

Well, I think we can think about a little bit about the difference between the public in the UK or Europe versus the United States, because everybody in Europe and in the United States and Canada and elsewhere in the world has seen what we've seen with Palestinians being bombed, with babies dying in incubators, with the horrific destruction of Gaza. That is, as one group after another has said, has been unprecedented, certainly in the 21st century and maybe in the last Hundred years, maybe.

We've seen nothing like this since World War II. The level of violence and the first focused violence against Palestinians has been breathtaking and heartbreaking to watch and infuriating.

But in the United States, there is this other pushback that I think not every country has, which is to say that the alliance with Israel and Israel's righteousness has a strong constituency. So there are a lot of people critiquing Israel, and then there is a very strong group of people. And that's new. Right.

The level of critique of Israel is absolutely new, unprecedented in the United States.

Unexpected by many of us to see that when this happened, finally or suddenly or both, American students and all sorts of American people from all sorts of parts of life, including many people of color, were very clear that what was happening to Palestinians was unacceptable and willing to say that in all sorts of venues. That level of criticism of Israel, unprecedented in American life. And for that reason, the backlash has been also unprecedented.

So what we've seen is a real attempt on a part of a very strange coalition of Republicans who don't care at all about Jewish issues in general, and American conservative Jews and others who have been trying to organize to really try to call this pro Palestinian sentiment antisemitic, and to say that the criticisms of Israel are going beyond what criticisms of other countries are. And therefore, that meets a certain highly problematic definition of anti Semitism that the US and others are supporting.

So I think it carries out in the United States in a quite different way, because there is this constituency that has always been willing to be pretty active on foreign policy issues when it came to Israel in support of Israel.

And then there's now a constituency of people who are speaking about Palestinians passionately and leading them to be very critical of what Israel is doing.

What they're seeing is happening in front of their eyes, and then they in turn react when they're called anti Semitic or silenced, as they have been stunningly, across the last year and several months by policymakers, universities, sort of mainstream liberal institutions of all types. So it has been like nothing. I've been thinking about Israel, Palestine for a very long time, and it's like nothing I've ever seen.

Liam Heffernan: 00:17:46

Yeah.

So how much do you think the antisemitism or Islamophobia and other sort of prejudices may inform the American dialogue on conversations around the Middle east and then ultimately affect the policies and the decisions that are made around how America acts in the Middle East?

Melani McAlister: 00:18:10

I think they are both really important and oversimplified often.

So we know that anti Arab intimate and anti Muslim sentiment has been around for a very long time and kind of really made ordinary in the United States.

I mean, people for years were willing and able to say things about Arabs that they would never say about other people, to talk about Islam as it relates in a way that would never happen in the. In any other circumstance, even if someone didn't like a certain religion.

The only other group that I think might get talked about in similar ways is Scientology. You know, that sense of this is a religion that's kind of beyond the bounds.

And that has been made ordinary in the United States over 100 years in popular culture and policymaking and public discourse.

And that, of course, plays a role, has been one of the reasons why Israel has been able to retain its aura of righteousness, as Amy Kaplan talks about Israel, as righteous victims or invincible victims, actually. But because people weren't seeing Palestinians, weren't interested in seeing Palestinians lives as equal to the lives of Israelis.

And therefore, Israeli violence and dispossession since the beginning of the state has been ignored, largely ignored in a lot of American public life. And anti Semitism is rampant in the United States and in Europe and would be wrong for anybody who cares about this to dismiss it in any way.

It's very significant.

I mean, last: 2017

But when it comes to Israel, I think that the real issue for me is that when we are asked to not see what we see happening to Palestinians, to sort of say, well, this is justified retaliation for what happened on October 7, which I also believe was a war crime, that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad's attack on October 7 was indeed against international law. And it's a war crime, although it is also clearly not the beginning of this violence.

certainly very intense since: 2000

I think that when we asked to not see what we see happening to Palestinians, to say that they somehow deserve it or that this is because, you know, it's acceptable to kill 30 or 300 civilians for every one fighter that the Israelis kill. And then if you Don't.

If you insist that you see it, you're anti Semitic, that has actually done more damage to the fight against anti Semitism than anything else that I know of. Because now people can just be like, I'm not anti Semitic. I know I'm not. And I don't have to think about that.

And you keep calling me that and now I'm just going to think that that whole issue is, excuse me, bullshit, because they're being asked to unsee what's in front of them. So I feel like this conflation of criticism with Israel with anti Semitism has been very, very bad for a real fight against anti Semitism.

Liam Heffernan: 00:21:47

Yeah.

re talking just since October: 2023

So it just, for you and me, and I'm sure a lot of other people listening to this, it feels like a no brainer to take the side of let's just stop people dying, right? Let's stop killing people. Why? Why is this such a challenging stance for the US to take, for instance?

Melani McAlister: 00:22:24

Yeah, I mean, let's, and from, from the US Perspective, let's stop funding it. Like, because if the US Stopped funding it, I'm not sure it would immediately stop it, but would have a huge impact.

And the fact that the US has not just not taken a stance against it, but has actively supported Israel in its attacks, its ongoing consistent attacks on Palestinians is so infuriating and so heartbreaking. And most Americans oppose it. Most Americans would like to see the US Stop funding the war on Gaza, the genocide of the Palestinian people there.

But the history of the sort of.

Even Barack Obama used to say there's no light between us talking, talking about Israel and the United States, that we're just so close that nothing can pass between us. And that sense of long alliance is baked into parts of the Democratic Party and parts of the Republican Party.

It's one of the few things that we can say is still a kind of shared issue across Democrats and Republicans in the United States, mainstream Democrats and mainstream Republicans.

And the fact is that the people who are opposed to it are either not numerous enough, are not politically powerful enough to actually make their numbers felt, because the numbers are clear. Americans oppose this.

But the power of people who are organized to support Israel kind of right or wrong Israel no matter what, and the relative disempowerment of people who Maybe are feeling, they're watching it, they don't like it, but they're not sure that they should call on the Biden administration to stop funding Israeli weapons. That seems a lot given the long term sort of soft or hard, you know, soft embrace of Israel by most Americans. You know, they, they kind of like it.

And the soft or more strong anti Arab racism that is common in the United States, it's asking for a flip that many people find hard to kind of move from saying, yeah, I don't like this, to like, let's get out on the streets and let's call our senators and let's put a stop to this. Now. I just want to say one other thing. One important factor we haven't mentioned has been Arab and Middle Eastern Americans in the United States.

So people who have Middle Eastern background are still a small percentage of Americans, maybe 2%, maybe less.

But that along with African American Muslims, Muslims from South Asia, a whole range of people who are, come with different perspectives about this, who don't come with this kind of necessarily this carte blanche for Israel. And they have been really important from the beginning, but certainly in the last year and a half to organize and mobilizing people.

And so that's been a certain high percentage of people who show up at these demonstrations, these student demonstrations. It's been important. Of course, it was important in Michigan where there's a lot of Arab and other Middle Eastern Americans.

And it's very important to recognize this diasporic community because they will carry this even after other Americans tend to forget and they will continue to bring this to the American public.

And I think if there is a long term change in the US relationship with Israel, it will be in part because they do not allow the rest of Americans to move on in some way that American attention tends to shift the minute the headline changes.

Liam Heffernan: 00:25:49

Yeah, that's a really, really important point. Thank you for that.

Now, you mentioned before the, the sort of, the strategic geography of the Middle east and, and this is why I want to bring Russia into the conversation here because we tend to talk about Ukraine at the moment when we talk about US And Russia, but when we consider how much of an ally Israel is to the US the, the strong Russian military presence in areas like Syria. Is the Middle east used essentially as a, as a battleground to fight basically a war by proxy between the US and Russia via their allies.

Melani McAlister: 00:26:31

I think one could have looked at the high days of the Syrian civil war that way, that the US Was clearly allied with the rebel movements and Russia was clearly supporting Assad and that that was maybe not a proxy war between the US and Russia, but it certainly put the power and the financial resources and the military resources of the US and Russia on two different sides and thus escalated that war in a number of ways.

I think that the proxy war that really is going on in the Middle east is the US and Iran, and that Iran is nothing like Russia in terms of its global military power. But as a regional military power, it's significant.

Of course there was all sorts of concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons, but also just Iran's complete uninterest in being a US ally. It's a very independent and very strongly anti American in a number of ways.

And so many policymakers see Iran as a country that certainly in any kind of near term is not going to be brought into the American fold. Saudi Arabia, sure. The Emirates, the Qatar, Dubai, all of those. Egypt you can buy.

The US has got a lot of allies in the region and convincing them to make peace with Israel, but Iran is not on that team.

And as long as Iran is also then supporting parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon, it's certainly seen from a mainstream policy perspective as a destabilizing force. The US doesn't want to go to direct war with Iran. Iran does not want to go to war with the United States.

But the allowance for Israel to invade southern Lebanon, for example, although they were pushed to, you know, get it over with, that, that the room for that comes in part because there's an interest in not just Israel has an interest or a perceived interest in getting rid of Hezbollah or weakening Hezbollah, which is also a way of weakening Iran.

And so even now, for example, people are talking about, you know, sort of what it means for the Syrian Islamist group, right, which is a Sunni Islamist fundamentalism being next to Iran's Shia oriented Islamic fundamentalism, it's a weakening for Iran.

That's one of the reasons they backed this completely secular, non, very non Iranian kind of leader in Assad, because of that sense that Sunni radicalism is not seen as helpful to Iranian national interests. So I think that we need to pay attention. Of course Russia is an issue, but I think the real kind of secret battle going on here is with Iran.

Liam Heffernan: 00:29:34

Yeah, that's interesting. And you know, you pointed out the fact that Iran has nuclear weapons or it's developing them and you know, it feels like, are we sleeping on Iran?

Because we, we're all so scared around the world of Russia. Is Iran really a threat?

Melani McAlister: 00:29:55

I think that Iran could be easily sort of brought into the world system as it was being brought into the world system with the agreements that the Obama administration had developed and that Iran is willing to negotiate, it's willing to put limits on its nuclear program.

And now the fact that we've basically pulled out of those agreements has been devastating for keeping a peaceful diplomatic solution to various different investments that Iran and the US And Europe have in the future of the Middle East. I think Iran is handle can be dealt with diplomatically and should be being dealt with diplomatically.

They've shown every intention to handle things that way.

And in fact, even when Israel was bombing, you know, assassinating people on their in their streets, the Iranians, you know, basically called them up and said, we're going to be sending 500 missiles. This is where they'll be coming, you know, get ready, so that the Israelis could, you know, deflect them all because they didn't really want a war.

So I think that Iran is not the kind of threat that a lot of people want to make it out to be. It's not a friendly government, but it's not friendly. Governments aren't necessary.

If you handle it diplomatically and they're willing to be handled diplomatically, which I think Iran is. It's not that kind of threat that maybe where Russia is not, you can negotiate with Russia too.

I think it's important to say that and that the unwillingness to do that has been a major problem, but it's not the kind of global power that Russia is for sure.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:33

Yeah.

So then when we look at this kind of historical cycle of conflict resolution, conflict resolution, it never feels like it gets any better, nor does it, I guess, feel like it gets any worse. It's just this constant cycle of conflict and the US likes to just sit in the middle there as a mediator to that.

But what's the end game to all of this?

Melani McAlister: 00:32:01

Oh, yeah. Well, if I really knew, obviously I would not be working as a professor at George Washington University.

But I will say that I don't think you're not wrong that it's been a source of conflict and some resolution and conflict again for many decades. But I think you can say that about a lot of parts of the world.

the humanitarian wars of the: 1990

And they have been deeply costly to Iraqis, to Afghans, to Americans, to American soldiers, to the pocketbooks of every American, and to the life of Iraqi civilians and Afghanis, of course.

But ever since that sense that you can kind of do a war to get what you want instead of having to do the hard work of negotiating with people who are not necessarily fun to negotiate with and who want very different things and who actually have some power to push for those things, the United States has chosen war way, way too easily. And it's funny to recognize that there has been a way in which, I mean, not that there was a lot of good behavior during the Cold War. I'm not put.

I'm not Cold War nostalgic.

ymakers have treated it since: 1990

And I think it might because of the kind of return of a multipolar world that we're seeing now with Russia and China.

Liam Heffernan: 00:34:21

Yeah. And so, you know, I wonder what it would actually take for America to be like, okay, we're done. We've done our job here.

We can leave the Middle east to it. Or, I mean, is that just a pipe dream?

Melani McAlister: 00:34:38

I don't think that any part of the world is going to ignore the Middle east because of its importance around resources, because of the particular investments in Israel, because the Middle east is so strategic as a site of movement and of peoples and interaction, and because of the Holy lands.

All of that, I think, means that the Middle east will always be subject to investment or intervention by outside powers, including Russia, including the United States, including the European Union and others. What I think is that. So I'm not calling for an isolationist approach to the Middle East. I'm calling for a diplomatic one.

And I'm asking us to think hard about the price of supporting Israel, no matter what, especially as we've seen it play out in this most recent war, because I think the price is going to be high in terms of how. I mean, policymakers in Egypt or Saudi or elsewhere will do what they do.

But the public, which has always gone hot and cold on what they think about the United States now, I think perceives much of the Middle Eastern public perceived the United States like they perceive Israel, not just as Israel's ally, but as a kind of monster public people who can see murderous killing, targeting of civilians, the attempt to destroy not just people, but a whole, the whole infrastructure that makes life possible in Gaza. And, you know, just vote for more weapons. I think it's going to be very, very difficult for the United States for a very long time.

Maybe even more influential than the Iraq war in terms of how the public sees the United States.

Liam Heffernan: 00:36:34

Yeah, interesting. Well, I think we've probably only just started the conversation on the US and the Middle east, but I think that for now I'm going to put a pin in it.

But there's so much more to discuss and hopefully we can revisit this on future episodes. But thank you so much, Melanie for joining me for this beginning of what will no doubt be a longer conversation on this. Anyone listening?

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.

And for anyone listening, if you want to find out more, we're going to leave some useful links in the show notes, including to Melanie's book as well. So do go and check that out and buy that. But Melanie, if anyone wants to connect with you directly, where can they do that?

Melani McAlister: 00:37:17

The best place is probably I just joined Blue Sky Social and so I am Melanie. It ends with an E M E L A N I M m c@blueSkyLuesky app and so if you'd like to connect with me, that would probably be the best way to do it.

I've finally gotten off Twitter so I.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:38

Am also a Blue sky convert so you can find me on there as well.

I am still on X at this is the Hef, so follow me on there if you want, but I'm not very active and on LinkedIn and all the other social channels as well, just search for my name. Again, thank you Melanie.

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