It is a bold undertaking to try to capture the relationship between two entities – ‘America’ and ‘the Middle East’ – over the span of some 230 years, during which both have undergone such phenomenal changes. Oren tackles this by pursuing three themes that frame the study and, for him, represent key determining aspects of the relations that the United States of America has established with Middle Eastern rulers, cultures, and peoples.

As the title of the book indicates, the first of these is ‘hard power’ in current international relations jargon – military force, as well as trade and energy concerns. The second is faith, standing for the peculiar fascination that the region holds for Protestant Americans. These two themes are often played out in an environment coloured by the third element: fantasy, associated with the lurid and bizarre imaginings that the Middle East has attracted in literature and in the cinema. Over the years, the combination of all three has formed a potent and often contradictory mix, leading not only to some disastrous US foreign adventures but also to profound rifts in US policy and academic establishments.

Written against the background of the US occupation of Iraq, where power, faith, and fantasy have all conspired effectively to dismember a Middle Eastern state and to bring untold miseries to its inhabitants, this is a timely and interesting book. However, it must be said that the earlier sections of the book, before the US becomes a world power, are in many ways the more fascinating and original.

It is here, in the infant republic's stumbling dealings with the Dey of Algiers or with the Qaramanli rulers of Tripoli, that one sees how realistic assessments of the limits of American power were always open to attack by those who advocated a more aggressive and radical involvement. In 1805, President Jefferson pulled the plug on a hare-brained scheme of ‘regime change’ in Tripoli and instead used the methods of ‘old Europe’ – bribery and diplomacy – to achieve America's objectives. This did little to console its author, Consul William Eaton, who melodramatically wrote ‘Honor recoils and humanity bleeds’ at the actions of an administration that appeared thereby to be supporting ‘patricide, fratricide, treason, perfidy … and systematic piracy’ (p. 69).

Oren's account is greatly enriched throughout these chapters by detailed and meticulous research in national and presidential archives, as well as in countless volumes of memoirs. Then, as now, it seems that there was a huge appetite among the American reading public for tales of the East, for heroic and instructive tracts and for stories of far-flung missions. Thus, many of the protagonists rushed into print, with the sand scarcely shaken from their shoes, providing a rich and often unintentionally hilarious vein of accounts that enliven this version of the long nineteenth century. By throwing up some truly eccentric and extraordinary people, this literature allows the author to bring history to life and to provide vivid embodiments of the themes he uses to frame this study.

In this way, he introduces us to adventurous, if doomed figures, such as John Ledyard, who died in 1788 trying to get from Egypt to Sennar in Sudan. Or to Muhammad Effendi, a Harvard divinity graduate named George English, who had converted to Islam. In 1821, he was the improbable and ineffective commander of the artillery in the army of Ismail Pasha in his conquest of northern Sudan and later the scarcely more effective personal envoy of John Quincy Adams to the court of the Ottoman sultan.

These pioneers were followed by impressive numbers of missionaries whose ranks were ravaged by disease (apparently, one-third died soon after arriving in the Middle East), but regularly replenished by evangelists eager to take up the cross, aiming to bring the light of their Protestant teachings to local Christians, as much as to Jews and Muslims. One of the stranger Protestant offshoots were the ‘restorationists’ of the mid nineteenth century, who believed in the need to re-create a Jewish state in Palestine as part of their imminentist view of human history. One of their number, the mystical Warder Cresson, was even appointed US Consul in Jerusalem, although it was said at the time that ‘he has no knowledge of Syria but what he derives from prophecy’ (p. 143). Another who gave them the backing of his considerable knowledge was the professor of Hebrew at New York University, George Bush, whose descendant and namesake at the White House appears to share some of these beliefs.

By telling the story of American involvement in the Middle East through the lives of these and other unusual characters, as well as through the ways in which the US government sought to use them, and was often bamboozled by them, a lively and very human story unfolds. The tone changes somewhat with the growth of US power in the twentieth century. It is certainly true that some eccentric Americans continue to make their mark, but the account now becomes more conventional, centred as it is on the policy initiatives of successive US presidents. This is particularly the case after the Second World War, when the history that unfolds, although accurate enough, is relatively well known and tends to lack the freshness of the earlier part of the book.

The author gives a good account, for example, of the hopeless muddle of the Reagan administration in its dealings with various Middle Eastern crises – and of the price paid by the US and by individual Americans for the ineptitude of their administration. However, these descriptive chapters lack the kind of critique that made the earlier chapters so engaging. It is almost as if the author, wary of the polarized attitudes amongst Americans concerning their country's involvement in the region, has fallen back on a safer narrative form which, whilst fairly representing opposing views, is notably weaker in terms of analytical thrust.

In fact, in a curiously titled epilogue – ‘A profound and visceral gratitude’ – the author expresses the wish that all may be made right between the US and the Middle East through ‘resolute but prudent demonstrations of America's power and firm but tolerant applications of its faith’ (p. 604). This is the very language used by the British and others throughout history to justify imperial domination. Yet, if this book has taught us anything, it is that good intentions are no match for the baneful logic of ‘hard power’ and the perils of faith-based foreign policy.