Emblazoned across the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, 15 November 1981 was a large photograph of hundreds of US soldiers from the army's 82nd Airborne Division parachuting into the vast western desert of the Sinai Peninsula. The photo was eerily reminiscent of the images from October 1956 when Israeli soldiers dropped into the same desert as part of their effort, along with British and French forces, to topple the government of Egyptian President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir. But the American soldiers were on a much different mission. Rather than attempting to bring down Egypt's government, they were there to participate, alongside Egyptian forces, in “Operation Bright Star,” the largest American military exercise in the Middle East since World War II. During the next ten days, more than 6,000 US soldiers participated in the “war games,” which stretched from Egypt to Sudan, Somalia, and Oman, at an estimated cost of more than 50 million dollars (157 million dollars in current figures). On 25 November, the penultimate day of the operation, a half dozen American B-52s flying from North Dakota dropped a cluster of bombs over the Egyptian desert and then returned home on a thirty-two-hour journey without stopping, demonstrating the vast reach of the American military.

Operation Bright Star was the product of one of the most transformative developments in American foreign relations during the post–World War II period: the far-reaching redirection of US geopolitical strategy from Europe and Asia to the Middle East and Persian Gulf region during the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. Olav Njolstad first made this observation in an impressive article for Cold War History in 2004.Footnote ¹ But in recent years, a number of historians, several of whose work is reviewed in this essay, have continued to explore how and why this transformation occurred. Some have suggested that national security officials in Washington, D.C. felt compelled to augment the US military presence in the greater Middle East. They did this to secure access to vital oil resources following two seminal events in 1979: the collapse of America's long-time ally in Iran, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Others, however, while not ignoring the importance of oil, have taken particular aim at the failures of the Nixon-Ford and Carter administrations to bring stability to the Middle East and achieve their strategic objectives through diplomacy. These failures, as this essay demonstrates, required leaders in Washington to change tactics, leading to the dramatic rise of America's military engagement in the region in the 1980s and beyond.

According to Salim Yaqub's Imperfect Strangers and James Stocker's Sphere's of Intervention, the failed diplomacy began under President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Instead of working for a comprehensive peace agreement that compelled Israel to withdraw from all Arab land seized in 1967, and to address the future status of the Palestinians, Nixon and Kissinger accepted the stalemate in the region. Nixon, says Yaqub, realized not only that alienating Israel and its American supporters “carried great political risks” (p. 21), but also that a stalemate in the region allowed him the flexibility to pursue his larger foreign policy objectives (i.e., détente with the Soviet Union and ending the Vietnam War). Kissinger, meanwhile, viewed the Arab–Israeli conflict strictly through a Cold War lens, which led him to lean overwhelmingly toward Israel at the expense of the Arabs. Because Egypt and Syria were Soviet allies, he believed it was a mistake for Washington to help either country regain territory by pressuring Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Better, in his mind, to delay any settlement until the Arab leaders had reduced their ties with the Kremlin and reoriented their nations to the United States (p. 26). In the fall of 1969, therefore, Nixon and Kissinger abandoned any pretense of an “evenhanded” Arab–Israeli policy and began to aggressively support Israel, thereby leaving the region, in Nixon's words, a “powder-keg,” waiting to explode.Footnote ²

Yaqub contends that even after the 1973 October War, when there was genuine momentum to launch a comprehensive peace settlement that would end Israel's control of the occupied territories and produce a period of greater stability in the Middle East, Kissinger “deliberately” (his emphasis), and mistakenly, focused on limited bilateral agreements in a Machiavellian scheme to ensure “Israel's indefinite occupation of Arab land” (p. 13). The shuttle diplomacy negotiations that consumed the bulk of Kissinger's diplomatic efforts in the Middle East from 1973 to 1975 and turned Kissinger into a media star, Yaqub argues, were merely a ruse to ensure Kissinger's “central objective” (p. 13) of neutralizing Egypt from the Arab–Israeli conflict and established a pattern for future administrations to follow. “The spectacle of simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous negotiations on several fronts would appear to heed the worldwide cry for progress toward a comprehensive settlement,” he suggests, but in the end merely “created the illusion of progress toward the 1967 borders while ensuring that those borders were never actually restored” (p. 149).

The Sinai II disengagement agreement, signed between Egypt and Israel in September 1975, was the perfect demonstration of the “illusion” of progress and failed diplomacy by Kissinger. Many observers at the time hailed the agreement for starting the process of Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, and committing both parties to resolve the conflict between them “not by military force but by peaceful means.”Footnote ³ However, Yaqub contends that the agreement was just a coy maneuver by Kissinger to avoid pursuing a comprehensive peace agreement. “A reasonable surmise is that Kissinger was playing a game of diplomatic chicken,” he says. “In driving US policy toward the brink of a comprehensive settlement (a fate he dreaded nearly as much as the Israelis did), he gambled that Israel would avert this outcome by making the necessary concessions to revive the step-by-step approach” (p. 170). Stocker largely agrees with Yaqub's assessment although for different reasons. With Sinai II, he contends, “Kissinger had aimed to pull apart the Egyptian–Syrian alliance so that step-by-step interim agreements between Israel and other Arab states would be possible; this required breaking the Arab consensus on a need for a comprehensive solution” (p. 154).

Kissinger's refusal to push for a comprehensive peace settlement may have strengthened Israel, but both Yaqub and Stocker believe the decision only exacerbated regional tensions. Stocker, in fact, maintains that Kissinger's failure to address the Palestinian issue during his high-profile shuttle missions left the United States “deeply complicit” in the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 (p. 14). Despite repeated requests by Talcott Seelye, the US Ambassador in Beirut, to increase diplomatic engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Kissinger chose to freeze the PLO out of any diplomatic process by promising Israel, as part of a secret agreement attached to Sinai II, that Washington would not recognize or negotiate with the organization so long as it did not recognize Israel's right to exist and accept UN Security Council Resolution 242. This had profound consequences inside Lebanon. By excluding the Palestinian issue from his discussions, says Stocker, Kissinger provided incentive for rejectionist groups to disrupt the negotiations, which helped accelerate the processes of Lebanese state collapse (p. 5).

In viewing Kissinger as rigidly insensitive to the Palestinians and lacking a broader understanding of the dynamics of regional politics in the Middle East, Stocker and Yaqub join a chorus of recent scholars who have revealed the “flawed architecture” of American foreign relations during the Nixon and Ford administrations. But what compounded the problem in Lebanon, they contend, was Kissinger's rigid determination to “subordinate” regional problems to larger US geopolitical objectives and Cold War politics. Both Yaqub and Stocker agree that the United States helped facilitate the transfer of weapons to Christian militias from third parties, and backed Israel's effort to cultivate a Christian-dominated Lebanon largely to counter the hostility of Muslim Arab states supported by the Soviet Union. Such aid and political support, Stocker claims, convinced Christian militia leaders that more US assistance would follow, or that US forces would intervene in the conflict to protect the Christians, much as they had done in 1958. Thus, instead of using diplomacy to defuse the crisis, Kissinger encouraged the Christian militias to move against the PLO and other Muslim militias inside Lebanon knowing that they would have US and Israeli financial and military support when needed.

Jimmy Carter's administration initially appeared to move away from Kissinger's staunch pro-Israel policies, both in Lebanon and in his Arab–Israeli negotiations. As Yaqub makes clear, the new president quickly launched “the most ambitious Middle East peace initiative ever attempted by a US president” (p. 239) by addressing many of the regional problems that Kissinger ignored. Between February and October 1977, Carter and his advisors labored aggressively to convene an international conference at which the main parties to the dispute, including the Palestinians, could reach a comprehensive settlement entailing “the fullest possible exchange of land for peace” (p. 239). During that same time, Carter went further than any previous US president in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian “homeland” in the West Bank and Gaza, and challenged Israeli leaders on the legality of settlements in the West Bank (p. 242). But like Kissinger, Carter soon abandoned his efforts at a comprehensive peace in favor of a separate Egyptian–Israeli agreement at Camp David, leaving the region highly unstable.

Yaqub blames this “retreat” (p. 239) from the pursuit of comprehensive settlement on the fact that Carter, by the summer of 1978, “had lost his stomach for confronting Israel” (p. 240). There is certainly much truth to this. The transcripts of conversations between US and Israeli officials during the Carter administration clearly show that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a knack for getting under Carter's skin through his rigid intransigence and willingness to spend countless hours quibbling over the most minute details of any future settlement. Carter told Israeli officials on more than one occasion that he believed Begin remained the single “obstacle” to peace and was convinced that the prime minister would refuse to

Still, the more likely explanation is that Carter, like Kissinger, chose to pursue a bilateral agreement with Egypt because Sadat presented him with a diplomatic opening that he simply could not ignore. That Carter chose to advocate for a bilateral agreement rather than cling to some unattainable comprehensive settlement was not a nefarious scheme, as Yaqub insists, but practical diplomacy.

Outside of the Arab–Israeli conflict, historians have largely reached a consensus that America's failed diplomacy in the Middle East during the 1970s was a direct consequence of its support for an unpopular regime in Iran. Roham Alvandi, in Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah, makes a convincing case that the British withdrawal from the region in 1971, and America's declining power during the Vietnam War, pushed the Nixon administration into a strategic “partnership” (p. 5) with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi that had far-reaching consequences for the US position in the Persian Gulf region. Long viewed as an American puppet, the Shah, in Alvandi's view, skillfully exploited America's preoccupation with Vietnam and its vulnerability after the oil crisis to establish Iran as “an autonomous Cold War actor” (p. 177). Nixon and Kissinger supported the Shah's efforts to arm the Kurdish insurgency against Soviet-backed Iraq and agreed to sell Iran a trove of the most sophisticated American weapons. Yet, says Alvandi, “neither Nixon nor Kissinger paid any heed to the Iranian opposition or expressed any concern about the human rights record of the Shah's regime” (p. 175).

This decision, much like in Lebanon, was a direct result of Nixon and Kissinger's preoccupation with Cold War politics and their efforts to achieve global stability. Nixon and Kissinger “embraced” (p. 176) the Shah as a partner, Alvandi maintains, because they viewed Iran as a centerpiece of the Nixon Doctrine. What mattered to the White House was the contribution that Iran could make to containing Soviet expansion into the Persian Gulf and a shared desire, along with the Shah, to “preserve order” at a time of revolutionary upheaval (p. 176). “These three Cold Warriors agreed that the threats to Iran's instability, both foreign and domestic, also constituted threats to the United States’ interests in this crucial theater of the Cold War,” says Alvandi (p. 176). The fact that President Nixon would agree to covertly support the Kurds, a relatively insignificant matter to the United States, “demonstrates the extraordinary influence [the Shah] enjoyed in the Nixon White House as a Cold War partner of the United States,” he says (p. 4). Yet, in allowing the Shah to use his newfound oil wealth to purchase billions of dollars in US weapons rather than invest inside Iran, Nixon and Kissinger helped unleash the Iranian opposition forces that contributed to the Shah's downfall and were “forever implicated in the Shah's misdeeds” (p. 176).

Carter again tried to reverse course from Nixon and Kissinger's failed diplomacy by calling on the Shah to make needed reforms inside Iran and pay greater attention to human rights. But according to Javier Gil Guerrero, this only added to Iran's problems and accelerated the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty. Guerrero, in fact, lambasts Carter for pressuring the Shah to improve human rights and political liberalization inside Iran at a time when Iran was highly unstable. “It escaped no one,” he says, “that, with Washington's focus on human rights, [the opposition] could confront the regime without fearing being jailed for it as long the human rights momentum persisted.” The “new climate” on human rights paved the way for organizations such as the Group for Free Books and Free Thought and the Iranian Committee for the Defense of Freedom and Human Rights to use their loudspeakers to chip away at the Shah's legitimacy. All of this could have been avoided had Carter not been “obsessively focused” (p. 36) on the Arab–Israeli negotiations and paid closer attention to the instability in Iran. “Most likely,” writes Guerrero, “had the Carter administration been aware of Iran's troubles (including the Shah's deteriorating medical condition), that pressure would have been milder and more restrained” (p. xxi).

Guerrero's work certainly adds to the corpus on the Carter administration's failed policies toward Iran, albeit in a less convincing and impactful manner than that of previous scholarship. Guerrro, in fact, repeats the familiar argument that the dysfunctional foreign policy team surrounding the president exacerbated Carter's problems with Iran. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the US Ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, and CIA Director Stansfield Turner, among others, he maintains, gave Carter conflicting advice that made it difficult to have a clear policy toward Iran at the height of the revolution. Vance and Sullivan strongly advocated that Carter encourage the Shah to liberalize his policies, negotiate with the opposition, and support a coalition government, which would result in stripping the Shah of much of his authority. Brzezinski and the National Security Council staff, by contrast, believed the State Department had “poorly advised” the White House and preferred to see the Shah use his military to crackdown on the demonstrations. Ideally, the CIA could have helped resolve these disagreements by providing useful ground intelligence that would have aided Carter in reaching a decision on whose advice he should follow. But the CIA felt it was almost impossible to assess the complete spectrum of dissidents fighting the Shah.

The significant disagreements inside the administration, along with the Shah's own vacillation over how to respond to the demonstrators, proved to be a “fatal combination,” says Guerrero. “In the face of the Shah and Carter's paralysis, the Iranian opposition snowballed, growing steadily larger and more radical.” Had Carter simply heeded Brzezinski's advice by supporting a military crackdown instead of advocating for human rights reforms, Guerrero alleges, the opposition could have been quelled. This is most likely wishful thinking given that the forces opposing the Shah's regime were largely unleashed long before the Carter period. But in Guerrero's telling, Carter's role “constituted a new factor that altered the course of events” (p. xxi). The president's poor management of the crisis and the “conflicting signals and messages” (p. xxiii) his administration sent to Iranian officials over the need to respect human rights and embrace political liberalization only fueled the upheaval. “Khomeni did not just ride the wave of economic crisis and political and religious discontent,” Guerrero insists. “Rather, he also undoubtedly counted on the notion that Carter would fail to act decisively to save the Shah” (p. xxii).

The repeated failures of America's Middle East diplomacy during the 1970s, stretching from North Africa to southwest Asia, produced several long-term consequences that are still being felt today. According to Yaqub, the US–Arab relationship became increasingly antagonistic as the United States became Israel's principal financial and military patron and, through its diplomacy, enabled Israel to maintain control of the Arab territories occupied during the June 1967 war. The spate of pro-Israel policies, he adds, gave rise to a wave of Arab American political activists, particularly among academics, who used the development of new Middle East studies programs at leading American universities to oppose US policies in the region. Arab Americans and Muslim Americans found “a greater sense of participation and belonging in the nation's civic life” (p. 13), and “enhanced the Arab image within the United States, an outcome of some benefit to Arab American political activism” (p. 14). In this regard, Yaqub concludes, the 1970s were the “pivotal decade” (p. 7) in the evolution of US–Arab relations and transformed the way Arabs and Americans understand each other.

But the larger, and far more significant consequence of America's failed diplomacy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf was the shift toward military force to achieve US objectives in the region. US Presidents from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, historian Andrew Bacevich argues in his most recent book, came to see that the United States “should rely on soldiers rather than diplomats to secure its interests in the region” (p. 25) and to “preserve the American way of life, rooted in a specific understanding of freedom and requiring an abundance of cheap energy” (p. 3). As the United States withdrew its forces from Vietnam, and the Soviet threat to Europe subsided after the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, Washington was able to turn its military prowess towards the Persian Gulf to ensure continued access to oil against the perceived threat of the Soviet Union or other hostile powers. “The Greater Middle East was to serve . . . as the chosen arena for honing military power into a utensil that would maintain America's privileged position and, not so incidentally, provide a continuing rationale for the entire apparatus of national security,” he argues (p. 361).

Although every administration shares blame for participating in what Bacevich clearly believes is a misguided “American War for the Greater Middle East,” he perhaps reserves his sharpest criticism for Jimmy Carter. By declaring in his January 1980 State of the Union address that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States . . . and will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force,” the so-called Carter Doctrine provided an “open-ended commitment” (p. 29) to future US military action in the region. Such a move, says Bacevich, was a gross overreach by a president desperate to “rebut the impression” that his failure to handle the “troubling events” in Iran and Afghanistan meant that he “was too dim, too soft, too lacking in vision for the office he held” (p. 27). For Bacevich, the “expansive language” (p. 29) articulated in the Carter Doctrine applied to areas well beyond the Persian Gulf. “Implementing the Carter Doctrine implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal American protectorate,” Bacevich writes. “While keeping the Soviets out, the United States would assume responsibility for enforcing good behavior on the part of anyone inclined to make mischief” (p. 29).

Bacevich's book will no doubt appeal to a wide audience wanting to understand the roots of America's military engagement in the greater Middle East during the past thirty-five years. But scholars will be disappointed by the thin evidence he uses to support many of his claims. Take, for example, Bacevich's assertion that the foundations for this engagement largely began with a June 1979 study by Paul Wolfowitz, a then relatively unknown official inside the Pentagon. Wolfowtiz's “Limited Contingency Study” claimed that the United States had “a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf,” stemming from America's need for oil and the necessity to confront the emerging threat from Saddam Husayn's Iraq. The United States must “make manifest our capabilities and commitments to balance Iraqi power,” Wolfowitz argued (p. 17). This is a convenient explanation for Bacevich, who has been highly critical of Wolfowitz and other “like-minded officials” (p. 232) in the national security establishment during the George W. Bush administration for drawing the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq after 9/11.Footnote ⁵ Yet, the extensive documentary record does not support the connection to Iraq during the Carter years.

Had Bacevich consulted this record rather than rely almost predominately on newspaper accounts and a handful of memoirs, he would have found that Iraq was not a centerpiece of the discussions for why the Carter administration sought an expansive military presence in the Middle East and Persian Gulf region. Brzezinski, in fact, wrote to Carter in early 1979, months before Wolfowitz's study, that the United States should use the pending Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty as the “take off” point for a more coherent approach to regional security problems. At the heart of Brzezinski's strategy was building new military relationships with the “moderate” Arab regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Israel, each of which had a shared interest in keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East, to prevent the spread of radical Islam, and to provide America's armed forces access to military bases, naval ports, and training facilities.Footnote ⁶

Indeed, if Wolofwitz's study gained as much traction among senior foreign policy and defense officials as Bacevich claims, and Iraq was truly the “chief emerging threat to US interests in the Persian Gulf” at the end of the 1970s (p. 90), it is surprising that Washington quickly “threw in with Saddam” (p. 87) during the Iran–Iraq War and that US policy “emphasized building up Iraq” throughout the 1980s (p. 93). There is no question that instability in the Gulf, exacerbated by the long Iran–Iraq war, led to a dramatic increase in the US military presence in the region. And Bacevich is certainly correct that the Reagan administration's decision to provide financial and military assistance to Iraq while covertly (and illegally) sending weapons to Iran was high “madness” (p. 92). Yet, Bacevich wrongly concludes that the escalation of the US military presence in the Gulf during the Iran–Iraq war “marked an important way station propelling the United States toward a fateful attempt to implement a strategy of regional hegemony” (p. 88), and served as a springboard to a series of wars in the 1990s that stretched from Somalia to the Balkans.

The more likely explanation, as Pierre Razoux contends in his authoritative study on the Iran–Iraq War, was that the United States increased its military presence in the Persian Gulf during the 1980s for the simple fact that it needed to secure its energy resources (p. 479). Drawing on a wealth of multiarchival evidence, Razoux makes a convincing case that leaders in Washington rightly feared that the instability in the region caused by the war, Soviet and Chinese meddling in the conflict, and the spread of Islamism would lead to a spike in energy prices, similar to what the West experienced in the 1970s. The Reagan administration's grudging support for Saddam Husayn, therefore, and its decision to dispatch the US Navy to patrol the Persian Gulf for Iranian aggression had less to do with supporting a “reprehensible” (p. 206) regime in Baghdad and converting the Gulf into an “American protectorate” than with insuring that Iran did not emerge victorious at the end of the conflict and gain control of vast resources in the Gulf.

Indeed, far from adopting a coherent strategy to achieve “regional hegemony” in the Middle East, Razoux makes it clear that the growth of the American military presence in the region was highly erratic and often exacerbated tensions in the Persian Gulf. The decision by officials inside the Reagan White House to covertly provide Iran weapons in exchange for hostages in Lebanon, he argues, significantly undercut their position with Saddam Husayn and led Reagan to later “turn a blind eye to Iraq's massive use of chemical weapons” (p. 376) as compensation for its misadventure with Iran. Iraq's subsequent attack of the USS Stark, killing thirty-seven crew members, and the errant strike on Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed all 290 passengers and crew, further demonstrated that the US armed forces were still learning how to operate in the volatile waters of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz and were far from ready to launch a “greater war for the Middle East.” American sailors often “verged on paranoia” (p. 408), Razoux writes, and the constant “fog of war” (p. 460) in the Persian Gulf left American defense officials searching for ways to scale down, not increase, the US military presence in the region.

Still, if Bacevich exaggerates the Iraqi connection, and overreaches by trying to connect wars in the Balkans and Somalia to future conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, he makes a rather convincing case that America's overwhelming victory over Iraqi forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War led US political and military leaders to draw improper conclusions about the utility of military force. Many American leaders came to believe that the United States, through its victory in the desert, had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” (p. 134), as President George H. W. Bush claimed, and demonstrated to future administrations, particularly after 9/11, that US military force could “transform” the Middle East and maintain America's access to oil. This was a “fundamental misreading” of Desert Storm, which, in Bacevich's view, accomplished “next to nothing” in terms of providing regional stability and producing Middle East peace (p. 134).

The proper lessons for using military force, says Bacevich, should have been derived from Operation Provide Comfort, an “unwelcome” addendum to Desert Storm (p. 138). This 1991 mission to rescue the Kurds in northern Iraq from the grips of Saddam Husayn's forces demonstrated not only the “unforeseen costs and risks” of trying to police the Persian Gulf, but also that the benefits stemming from the victory in Desert Storm did not fully live up to Washington's expectations (p. 138). Instead, neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration, such as Wolfowitz, Vice President Richard Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “seized the opportunity” after 9/11 to advocate for their conviction that “military assertiveness” should be the foundation of American global leadership (p. 217). The result, as the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate, was that this military assertiveness rooted in the Carter administration to protect American access to the resources of the Middle East has veered far from those objectives and inflicted even greater damage on the object of America's “supposed beneficence” (p. 362).

Considering the repeated military failures, it seems fair to ask why the United States has not disengaged militarily from the region. Bacevich believes that this stems from a myriad of reasons including the naiveté and ignorance of American leaders “to discern the historical forces at work in the region” (p. 363) and the reluctance of politicians and generals to keep US forces in a conflict long enough to finish the job. Thus, “instead of intimidating, US military efforts have annoyed, incited, and generally communicated a lack of both competence and determination,” says Bacevich (p. 367). It may be too early to tell if Bacevich's conclusions are correct. But he has no doubt thrown down the gauntlet for future historians to understand whether the United States has been more successful accomplishing its strategic objectives in the Middle East through military force or active diplomacy.