Theodore Roosevelt and a companion ride camels in Sudan, c. 1909 (Bettmann / Corbis)
Robert Kagan wrote a review for The Washington Post of Michael B. Oren’s new book America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present. The review is very positive. Kagan has convinced me that this is a book everyone interested in this subject / American foreign policy / the Mideast, should read. That is why I decided to link to this review here at TMV: hoping that more people will read Oren’s new book.
Kagan writes:
We often hear that Americans know little about other nations; a bigger problem is that we know too little about ourselves, our history and our national character. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, in particular, we were all born yesterday, unaware of how present policies and attitudes fit into persistent historical patterns. So when a brilliant, lucid historian such as Michael B. Oren does bring the past back to life for us, revealing both what has changed and what has stayed the same, it is a shaft of light in a dark sky.
Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.
As a historian, Oren is more storyteller than grand theorist, so as a study of the complex and contradictory motives of American behavior, his book is a bit thin. Nevertheless, three powerful themes emerge from his tales: that from the Founders onward, Americans have repeatedly tried to transform Arab and Muslim peoples — politically, spiritually and economically — to conform to liberal and Christian principles; that since the days of the Puritans, many Americans have been obsessed with the idea of “restoring” Palestine to the Jews; and that from the colonial era to the present, many (and perhaps most) Americans have regarded Islam as a barbaric, violent and despotic religion. Whether these purposes and perceptions have been intelligent or misguided, based on reality or fantasy, Oren shows that they have been the dominant features of our foreign policy tradition in the Middle East.
Oren demonstrates that suspicion and hostility toward Islam are almost as old as the nation. John Quincy Adams called it a “fanatic and fraudulent” religion, founded on “the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel.”
This was partly religious prejudice, of course, but that prejudice was reinforced by unfortunate experience. In the perilous early years of the republic, the Muslim Barbary powers preyed on American shipping and captured, tortured and enslaved hundreds of innocent men and women. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson implored the pasha of Tripoli to stop, Oren recounts, the pasha’s emissary insisted that the Koran made it the “right and duty” of Muslims “to make war upon” whichever infidels “they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners.” George Washington raged, “Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence.” And Congress did create a navy in the 1790s primarily to crush the Barbary powers and protect American traders and missionaries. President Jefferson — so often mislabeled as an idealist, pacifist and isolationist — eagerly launched the war and ordered the permanent stationing of U.S. naval forces thousands of miles from the nation’s shores.
Kagan explains, by using Oren’s book, that Americans have always tried to reform the Middle East. Although Christian “missionaries utterly failed to convert Muslims to Christianity … they did work to spread the “gospel of Americanism”: liberalism, technology and democracy.”
Read the entire review for yourself… and then go and buy the book.
Again, h/t to my friend and personal editor Holly.
UPDATE
Dave Schuler links in the comment section of this post, to this article at his own blog. Dave writes: “Y’all might be interested in a post of mine from a while ago on the first official contact between the United States and Saudi Arabia. It was by FDR during WWII right after the Yalta conference.”
Go there, it’s an interesting read.
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