The Second World War marked a decisive shift in America’s way of seeing and operating in the Middle East, from a cultural, commercial power present in the imperial orders of others (those of the Mohamed Ali dynasty, the Ottomans, or the British) towards the designer and guarantor of a new political and economic order.

Oil was the primary driver behind this shift. The beginning of the Cold War and the emergence of a strategic struggle in the world between the western and eastern blocks, transformed oil from a commercial product with vast industrial usages to a strategic asset whose production, distribution, storage, and of course pricing are vital to the global economy. As a result, America evolved its involvement with the oil industry from commanding some concessions in a British commercial and security order in the Gulf, towards overhauling the entire parameters of Gulf security. Immediately after the end of World War II, President FD Roosevelt agreed with King Abdel-Aziz al-Saud a grand bargain anchored on oil for security. And few years later, the US orchestrated a coup in Iran to secure complete control over the country’s oil production.

The Eastern Mediterranean was the second pillar of this new American power architecture in the region. In the late 1940s, the Truman Doctrine reframed the region from a European colonial domain to an important Cold War frontier. A decade later, during the Suez Crisis in 1956, the US forced Britain and France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt making it clear that the US will not underwrite the old colonial system in the region. And by the end of the decade, President Eisenhower explicitly committed the United States to intervene, politically and militarily, to defend the Middle East against, what he termed ‘the Communist aggression’. And indeed, in the aftermath of Iraq’s bloody revolution and the massacre of the Hashemite royal family there, and at the height of the Nasserite Arab nationalist tide in the late 1950s, American troops landed in Beirut to bolster, what was then considered, one of the most pro-American regimes in the region.

The American political and military presence did not lessen. The United States lent Israel crucial support in the 1967 war. Few years later, President Nixon, with incisive advice from national security advisor Henry Kissinger, introduced the “twin pillars” American strategy, which not only considered Saudi Arabia and Iran (under the Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi) key allies that were expected to support the perpetuation of the Pax Americana in the region, but also saw the Gulf as a string of military bases from which America was able to project power in the area extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Sub-Continent.

The Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 were the background of what came to be known as the ‘Carter Doctrine’ that explicitly considered the Gulf “a vital United States interest” that it would defend by force. Few years later, under President Reagan, the United States established CENTCOM, which institutionalised a major American military presence in and around the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa.

After relatively limited American military operations in Lebanon in 1983 and against Libya in 1986, came the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait in 1991, in which America deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in the Arabian Peninsula, along with the largest firepower the world had seen since the end of the Vietnam War, and by some estimates since the Second World War.

All of these interventions had mixed results. The two-decades occupation of Iraq, however, which came almost immediately after the 9.11 attacks, proved disastrous to the region and to America’s positioning in it. The absence of all the factors that had justified the war and the occupation did a lasting damage to the liberal hegemon narrative the US had sought to promote since the end of the Cold War. The acute skepticism that some on the Arab political and cultural left had sustained for decades against the US’s motives and ways of seeing the region was confirmed in the minds of the largest sections of Arabs.

The damage transcended perceptions. Eliminating Saddam Hussein’s secular political architecture removed the main obstacle that had stood in the way of Iran extending its religious and cultural influence over large parts of Iraqi society. This seeded the emergence of considerable political and military influence for the Iranian Shiite Islamic Republic in the entire Levant. The overt rise of sectarianism was a factor in stirring militant jihadism, whose primary groups, although largely controlled by regional and western intelligence agencies, still drew thousands of young people from the region and beyond, who were willing to sacrifice their lives to fight sectarian wars which wrought havoc on the region’s societies.

With all these damages - and with it the colossal human loss and financial cost that these American interventions, particularly the Iraq war, had resulted in - many in the region and beyond came to believe that America was unable to use its military dominance to create durable political orders that serve its interests. It seemed that over six decades of American assertion of power in the region came to inconclusive ends.

This was a trajectory of American engagement in the region that was unthinkable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when, as discussed in the previous two articles in this series, America had built its presence in the region on missionary, educational, and cultural foundations, and had managed with limited investments to instil many of its founding ideas and ideals in the imaginations of some of the region’s most inspiring and inspired minds. As the next and last article in this series will show, America now faces a strategic dilemma: whether to persist with the six-decades trajectory of relying on its overwhelming military power to douse imagined demons and at best to secure short term interests, or to take inspiration from its earliest engagements in the Middle East (in the nineteenth century) and allow the new regional social dynamics, and the new global geo-political and geo-economic realities to prompt a rethinking of its path and position in the Middle East.