The decline (but not fall) of US hegemony in the Middle East

Middle East Report

Volumn 31, Issue 220, 2001, Pages 12-22

  Mohamedi, Fareed ^a   Sadowski, Yahya ^b  

^a Petroleum Finance Company   (United States)

^b AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT   (Lebanon)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FOREIGN POLICY; HEGEMONY; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS;

MIDDLE EAST; UNITED STATES;

EID: 0034774423     PISSN: 08992851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1559406     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. See Michael Klare, "America's Military Revolution," Le Monde diplomatique (July 2001).
2. Unilateralism, sometimes known as isolationism, is one of the two great traditions in US foreign policy (the other being Wilsonian liberalism). Unilateralists properly object to being called isolationists because they do not advocate an end to overseas adventures, particularly where strategic interests are at stake. But they are deeply suspicious of entanglements in Europe. See Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997), ch. 2.
3. Some unilateralism has been evident in the choices of every US president since World War II. Bill Clinton, who embraced multilateralist rhetoric and was eager to cooperate with Europe in various fora, sometimes behaved this way. But the second Bush administration is unique in its belief that unilateralism is a virtue in itself.
4. See Charlie Cray, "Bush's Corporate Cabinet," Multinational Monitor 22/5 (May 2001).
5. Frank Rich, "The Backslap Backlash," New York Times, June 9, 2001.
6. Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs (January/February 2000).
7. Sec Charles Kupchan, "Life After Pax Americana," World Policy Journal 26/3 (Fall 1999).
8. For an alternative claim, that unilateralism might be a tool for progressive politics, see Ian Robertson, "Progressive Unilateralism," Foreign Policy in Focus Discussion Paper 3 (November 15, 2000).
9. Richard Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff. The United States After the Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1998). Haass is now chief of the policy planning staff at the State Department.
10. For an account of this critical meeting, see Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). Cheney seems never to have realized how much his stance at this meeting shocked and offended the Saudi leadership, particularly Defense Minister Prince Sultan, who has been much more skeptical about the benefits of US support ever since.
11. William F. Buckley, In Search of Anti-Semitism (New York: Continuum, 1992).
12. For the origins of the idea of smart sanctions, see Meghan O'Sullivan, "Iraq: Time for a Modified Approach," Brookings Policy Brief 71 (February 2001).
13. Alexander Primakov, Putin's senior advisor on Middle Eastern affairs, has family links to a Russian business that profits greatly from the Iraq trade. There are, of course, means by which the US might overcome Russia's economic objections if Washington was more prepared to negotiate. China reversed its opposition to smart sanctions, and was rewarded with $100 million of UN-approved contracts for doing work in Iraq. Colum Lynch, "Trade Deal Won Chinese Support of US Policy on Iraq," Washington Post, July 6, 2001.
14. Oil independents do seem to affect Bush's foreign policy initiatives in areas less strategic for the US than the Middle East. See Wayne Madsen, "Big Oil Change," In These Times, August 20, 2001.
15. A sober look at the energy business, even on the right, suggests that there is no real crisis, only some short-term bottlenecks that have been exploited by profiteers. See Dan Ackman, "There Is No Energy Crisis," Forbes, May 2, 2001.
16. Robert Manning, "The Asian Energy Predicament," Survival 42 (Autumn 2000).
17. Koji Morita, "Gas for Oil Markets," Royal Institute of International Affairs Energy and Environmental Program Briefing Paper 12 (February 2000).
18. The political affiliations of the multinational corporation remain a subject of great debate and complexity. See John Stopford, "Multinational Corporations," Foreign Policy (Winter 1998-99). However, the condominium of interests between Big Oil and big government that dominated Washington through most of the twentieth century began to fall apart in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration began to drive US companies out of two of the richest reservoirs in the Middle East, Libya and Iran.
19. Martin Walker, "Europe: Superstate or Superpower?" World Policy Journal (Winter 2000-01).
20. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "Europe's Chance in die Mideast," New York Times, July 16, 2001.
21. Karl Kautsky, "Ultra-Imperialism," New Left Review 59 (1970).
22. For a detailed account of this historical detour, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996).