Osamah F. Khalil's important work of intellectual history opens with a reminder: the “Middle East” was in many respects an American invention. The term was coined in 1902 by US naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan as a way to describe a region that, as Mahan argued, warranted continued British imperial domination. Despite Mahan not specifying geographical boundaries for the region, the term “Middle East” nevertheless was widely taken up in anglophone journalism, scholarship, and policy discourses of the period. Over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, American expertise about the Middle East was continually made and remade at the intersection of academic knowledge production and state interest.

America's Dream Palace takes its title from a passage by T. E. Lawrence. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence presents himself as a catalyst in bringing the Middle East into modernity. “I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts” (quoted at 2). Khalil's thorough and absorbing history excavates a dream palace that was less the result of national aspirations in the region than it was the creation of American “missionaries, spies, soldiers, diplomats, and scholars” (3). The book chronologically charts how, from World War I through the Global War on Terror, dense relationships among US government agencies, universities, and private foundations produced and disseminated expert knowledge about the Middle East. Khalil argues that the interests of US foreign policy primarily drove the knowledge created out of these relationships, and the locus of expertise changed over time to best meet those interests. While the relative impact of these domains varied over the course of the century, Khalil foregrounds the persistent and durable influence of orientalism on US foreign policy. The Middle East was routinely construed as inferior, tyrannical, traditional, a threat to Western civilization, while the heritage of American exceptionalism provided a warrant for the expansion of US power in the region.

The arc of Khalil's narrative moves from the “private knowledge” produced for the Wilson administration, to the Cold War influx of state funds for university area-studies units, to the rise of “privatized knowledge” produced by policy-focussed think tanks backed by private foundations. Each chapter focusses on a particular nexus of actors and agencies, and the forms of knowledge they produced. Chapter 1 highlights the World War I-era work of 150 scholars called “the Inquiry,” whose Western Asia division was supervised by the Classics professor William Westermann, and whose proposals were “marked by Orientalist sentiments and notions of racial and religious supremacy” (37). Chapter 2 addresses the World War II-era development of partnerships between the US Office of Strategic Services, the Army Specialized Training Program, and the university campuses tasked with producing salient region-specific research and analysis for the war effort. Chapter 3 identifies the early Cold War rise of the State Department's External Research Staff, a unit tasked with interfacing between the US government, so-called “national security academics,” and a suite of academic organizations like the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Chapter 4 stands apart from the others by focussing on academic institutions not based in the United States – in this case, the American University of Beirut and the American University of Cairo.

Chapter 5 turns to the 1958 passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and its effects on the development of Middle East studies as a field. While its first decade was marked by successful institution-building efforts, the “permeable line between academia and the national security state” (180) that, for some, the NDEA exemplified was the subject of criticism. Chapter 6 elaborates how key publications central to modernization theory, including Daniel Lerner's Passing of Traditional Society (1958), emerged in part out of a partnership between academic units and the US State Department. Such work encoded an orientalist racial logic that centered the tutelary role of the US in bringing the peoples of the region into modernity. Chapter 7 highlights the growing influence of think tanks like RAND, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as alternative venues for the development and analysis of foreign policy. These privatized forms of expertise developed in the context of widespread revelations and criticism of long-developed partnerships between US scholars, private research-oriented foundations, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Segments of academia, including those whose research focussed on the Middle East, were openly unsympathetic to US foreign policy. Finally, work like Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) offered an intervention into the scholarly genealogy of power and knowledge that emphasized the tenacity of racial discourse in constructing expertise about the “other.” As Khalil aptly puts it, “although Said arguably won the contest of ideas within academia, [British orientalist Bernard] Lewis's influence was far more pronounced within policy circles” (239). The book closes by identifying how the contours of orientalist expertise during the First and Second Gulf Wars were shaped by tight-knit relationships between the US foreign-policy establishment and US think tanks and other private organizations.

Khalil's revelatory history of the changing shape of expert knowledges about the Middle East offers a significant contribution to the field of American studies.