ABSTRACT
The US endeavor to impose its hegemony on the Middle East, which predates the 1967 war, reflects the consensus of US politicians on all sides of the spectrum. With the departure of the former colonial powers—the United Kingdom and France—US planners decided the Middle East would be recolonized by the United States. In an era of decolonization, Arab nationalist ideas and concepts, such as Arab unity, Arab socialism, non-alignment, Arab security, Arab defense, return and restitution for Palestinian refugees, and indeed Arab–Israeli parity were considered anathema in Washington and Tel Aviv. The various US doctrines for the Middle East—starting with the Truman Doctrine all the way up to the Carter Doctrine and Reagan Codicil, and beyond—were part of the US policy of containment. 1 That policy was intended to contain Arab nationalism just as much as it was directed against the Soviet Union. The Arab world had to be kept at bay and subordinated to Israel, which was assured, since the Nixon presidency, of a “margin of technological and military superiority over all of her Arab neighbors combined.” That assurance, which was made by President Richard Nixon, who was widely considered to be an anti-Semite, was upheld by every succeeding president and has been respected by presidential candidates from the two major parties all the way through to George W. Bush and Al Gore Jr. in 2000 and Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain in 2008. That is how powerful the US consensus on Middle East policy has become.
