Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967 - Hardcover

Jacobs, Matthew F.

 
9780807834886: Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0807834882 ISBN 13: 9780807834886
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

As its interests have become deeply tied to the Middle East, the United States has long sought to develop a usable understanding of the people, politics, and cultures of the region. In Imagining the Middle East, Matthew Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the region have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there.

Jacobs examines the ways in which an informal network of academic, business, government, and media specialists interpreted and shared their perceptions of the Middle East from the end of World War I through the late 1960s. During that period, Jacobs argues, members of this network imagined the Middle East as a region defined by certain common characteristics--religion, mass politics, underdevelopment, and an escalating Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and as a place that might be transformed through U.S. involvement. Thus, the ways in which specialists and policymakers imagined the Middle East of the past or present came to justify policies designed to create an imagined Middle East of the future. Jacobs demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

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About the Author

Matthew F. Jacobs is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.

From the Back Cover

Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the Middle East have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there. He demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

From the Inside Flap

Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the Middle East have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there. He demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date
2011
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0807834882
ISBN 13 
9780807834886
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
336

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