A few years ago, a few minutes before beginning a dissertation defense panel, a noted diplomatic historian turned to one of his fellow panelists, a political scientist, with experience in government, who studies the Middle East. The historian remarked, “All my incoming graduate students are studying the Middle East.” His counterpart nodded wistfully, replying, “This, too, shall pass.”

So the pendulum seems to swing in the broader community of American Middle East specialists, as interest and interpretations appear to wax and wane. Religious and national sentiment are alternately regarded as constructive or negative forces. The region is variously depicted as poised on the brink of dramatic change, or teetering toward implosion.

Matthew Jacobs has written an important book on the origins and evolution of how educated and influential Americans have understood the Middle East. Ranging widely in terms of both time and geography, his Imagining the Middle East chronicles fifty years of the American pursuit of both secular and sacred missions in the broader region.

Jacobs situates his book alongside several other landmark studies of the US–Middle East relationship. It clearly augments the broad political history offered by Douglas Little in American Orientalism (2002), and the cultural history provided by Melani McAlister in Epic Encounters (2001). This book is also recognizably a cousin of David Engerman's study of the sovietologists, Know Your Enemy (2009), although more of the action here occurs well before the Second World War, and Engerman's account focusses more on debates within the academy.

Alongside McAlister, Jacobs works to refine and historicize the Saidian method. His Middle East experts are products of their own eras, as well as having distinct outlooks and motivations. They are allowed to emerge as individuals, not agents of a monolithic imperial actor. Consequently, Jacobs is alert to a fundamental transition that occurred in the early to mid-twentieth century: the gradual replacement of an early generation of Middle East experts predominantly drawn from missionary families with a more professionalized cadre of specialists who sought verifiable statistics to measure the progress (or lack thereof) of Middle Eastern societies. Leaping across this generational chasm, however, is a constant belief in American mission in the Middle East: the ability and responsibility of the new Jerusalem to redeem and renew the old.

Several recurrent themes emerge across the chapters in this book. One is the recurring tendency of Americans to interpret the Middle East in terms of individuals: to be drawn toward a modernizing leader like Kemal Atatürk, or to recoil from a violent figure such as the Mufti of Jerusalem. Only in the 1950s did policymakers begin to see nationalism as something broader than the cults of personality attending charismatic leaders. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, for example, evoked a wide range of responses from policymakers.

In part, this underscores a second theme: the impact of the Second World War. Jacobs helpfully situates his experts within their respective generations. Products of the latter global struggle emerge here as anxious Cold Warriors, fearful both of the Soviet permutation of “totalitarianism” and of the force of popular nationalism in the Middle East. Totalitarianism shaped ideas of Islam as well, leading to generalizations about it being a restrictive, hobbling societal force.

A third theme is the insistence of experts in viewing a region in need of various kinds of redemption, particularly economic and political modernization. Jacobs's fourth chapter examines the application of modernization theory to the Middle East, under the guiding assumption that economic development would divert populist leaders (like Nasser) from other pursuits less congenial to Cold War strategy. Prosperity, in short, was the answer to political problems. Readers, by this point, will nod their heads at the familiarity of these ideas, which have again become so prominent in the post-9/11 era.

The fifth chapter of this book may be the most contemporaneous in focus. Jacobs writes with care on a subject that is often incendiary – the domestic debate within the United States over relations with Israel. This chapter stands apart from its peers in that it is a study of the political standing of the specialist network within the American polity. Looking over fifty years, Jacobs examines the efforts of the network to come to grips with the question of Zionism (its members entirely opposed the establishment of Israel) and the subsequent damage that the battle over Israel inflicted on their broader credibility and professional standing. It is a provocative chapter, but one that sometimes seems distant from other, related accounts of postwar America.

As one case in point, Jacobs argues that the network approached the Israel question largely from a national security framework, only to be tarred with charges of anti-Semitism. This has a familiar ring to it, yet the 1940s were a different era altogether in American society. Discrimination against Jews remained widespread in institutions of higher education and the professions. Israeli independence occurred one year after the film Gentleman's Agreement called unprecedented public attention to the phenomenon of American anti-Semitism, and only four years after the demotion of Breckinridge Long. While Jacobs is assuredly correct in asserting that network members opposed Israel primarily out of national security concerns, that does not preclude other rationales from having been present to lesser degrees, particularly since he does examine network biases against Arabs during the period. Peter Hahn finds anti-Jewish prejudice an occasional but not predominant factor in his own study of policy in that era. More broadly, the political strength of pro-Israel organizations in the early Cold War period remains debatable. Warren Bass's Support Any Friend (2003) (unmentioned in this book) argues that their effective emergence occurred significantly later.

Also emerging in this chapter is a fascinating argument about a policymaker I have studied in some depth myself, the inimitable Robert Komer. Jacobs depicts Komer, a powerful member of the National Security Council Staff in the 1960s, as a person on the periphery of the network. This may be problematic, as Komer's geographic responsibilities on the NSC encompassed, over time, the entire African continent, the Middle East, South Asia, and Indonesia. This, in turn, somewhat undermines the argument that Komer's acceptance of the US–Israel relationship was representative of the network as a whole. Komer was, to put it mildly, idiosyncratic, and tended to use or discard expertise in pursuit of his chosen goals. Having noted ARAMCO's espousal of Middle East modernization, moreover, I am surprised that Jacobs does not examine the considerable unease engendered within the corporate sector of the network by Komer's concurrent efforts to engage Nasser during the Kennedy years.

With some sympathy, Jacobs writes of the network's fracturing and eclipse in the wake of the Six Day War. Here, I think, he is tracing one strand of a broader process noted by domestic historians such as Brian Balogh, Julian Zelizer, and others: the political decline of experts amid popular assaults on their privileged status in policy debates. Yet, in spite of the eclipse of the founding generations of Middle East specialists, we seem doomed to cycle through variations on their prior responses to the challenges posed by that region. Matthew Jacobs has provided scholars, students, and policymakers alike with an invaluable account of the evolution of American thought about that area, thereby offering at least a fleeting hope that better-informed decisions might lie in our future.