Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

American foreign policy in the Middle East has been critiqued in the post 9/11 world as being overly militarized. Scholars evaluating the outcome of foreign policy ventures large and small are almost universal in their criticism of an American tendency to leverage hard power in pursuit of any number of objectives.[1] In fact, whether the unit of analysis is military personnel and bases, arms exports, or military engagement, it is almost a truism that “hard power” and “militarized” seem to be the dominant descriptors of America’s approach to a region that is just as quickly understood to be one of intractable conflict.

Realist interpretations of American foreign policy will focus on characterization of the region as one of strategic importance but combative local politics which necessitates a militarized U.S. posture. By contrast, more recent critical approaches argue that such an approach exacerbates the regions conflicts rather than the other way around.[3] Perhaps it is the frequency of armed conflict in the region that keeps the eyes of analysts and academics firmly fixed in the present and recent past, but that would be a mistake. To analyze American foreign policy in the Middle East only in terms of the last 20 or even 30 years is to miss the important historical and path-dependent roots of current Middle East conflicts and U.S. entanglements in these conflicts. In fact, it turns out that the U.S. approach to the region was not always military-centric.

This paper presents a path dependent framework for analyzing the Eisenhower Doctrine as a critical juncture that shifted American foreign policy to the more militarized approach to America’s Mid-East diplomacy. It argues that the effect of the Eisenhower Doctrine over time has been its elevation from a context specific policy to that of a standard operating procedure, or policy template, for future administrations due to a positive feedback loop the doctrine generated among American partners and allies in the region after the successful deployment of American troops to Lebanon in 1958.

[1] Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The history and Politics of Orientalism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 120.

[2] Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 274-276.

[3] Ray Takeyh, The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine: The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953-1957, (London: MacMillan Press LTD, 2000).