American Intervention in The Middle East - Background

Background

The United States’ relationship with the Middle East prior to the Second World War was minimal. Moreover, in comparison to European powers such as Britain and France which had managed to colonise almost all of the Middle East region after defeating the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the United States was ‘popular and respected throughout the Middle East’. Indeed, ‘Americans were seen as good people, untainted by the selfishness and duplicity associated with the Europeans’. American missionaries had brought modern medicine and set up educational institutions all over the Middle East. Moreover, the US had provided the Middle East with highly skilled petroleum engineers. Thus, there were some connections made between the United States and the Middle East before the Second World War. Other examples of cooperations between the US and the Middle East are the Red Line Agreement signed in 1928 and the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement signed in 1944. Both of these agreements were legally binding and reflected an American interest in control of Middle Eastern energy resources, namely oil, and moreover reflected an American ‘security imperative to prevent the (re)emergence of a powerful regional rival’. The Red Line Agreement had been ‘part of a network of agreements made in the 1920s to restrict supply of petroleum and ensure that the major companies…could control oil prices on world markets’. The Red Line agreement governed the development of Middle East oil for the next two decades. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement of 1944 was based on negotiations between the United States and Britain over the control of Middle Eastern oil. Below is shown what the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt had in mind for to a British Ambassador in 1944:

Persian oil …is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.

On August 8, 1944, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement was signed, dividing Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. Consequently, political scholar Fred H Lawson remarks, that ‘by mid-1944, U.S. officials had buttressed their country’s position on the peninsula by concluding an Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement that protected “all valid concession contracts and lawfully acquired rights” belonging to the signatories and established a principle of “equal opportunity” in those areas where no concession had yet been assigned.’ Furthermore, political scholar Irvine Anderson summarises American interests in the Middle East in the late 19th century and the early 20th century noting that, ‘the most significant event of the period was the transition of the United States from the position of net exporter to one of net importer of petroleum.’

By the end of the Second World War, the United States had come to consider the Middle East region as ‘the most strategically important area of the world’. and ‘…one of the greatest material prizes in world history’. For that reason, it was not until around the period of the Second World War that America became directly involved in the Middle East region. At this time the region was going through great social, economic and political changes and as a result, internally the Middle East region was in turmoil. Politically, the Middle East was experiencing an upsurge in the popularity of nationalistic politics and an increase in the number of nationalistic political groups across the region, which was causing great trouble for the English and French colonial powers.
History scholar Jack Watson explains that ‘Europeans could not hold these lands indefinitely in the face of Arab nationalism’. Watson then continues, stating that ‘by the end of 1946 Palestine was the last remaining mandate, but it posed a major problem’. . In truth, this nationalistic political trend clashed with American interests in the Middle East region, which were, as Middle East scholar Louise Fawcett argues, ‘about the Soviet Union, access to oil and the project for a Jewish state in Palestine.’ Hence, ‘‘‘Arabist’ ambassador Raymond Hare’ described the Second World War period, as ‘the great divide’ in United States’ relation with the Middle East, because these three interests would later serve as a backdrop and reasoning for a great deal of American interventions in the Middle East and thus also come to be the cause of several future conflicts between the United States and the Middle East.

For more details on Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement, see Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement. For more details on Red Line Agreement, see Red Line Agreement.