Category: Foreign Policy
The United States and the Middle East: 1914 to 9/11 by Salim Yaqub
General Description
This lecture series is a narrative history of U.S. political involvement in the Middle East from World War I to the present day. Presented from a historian’s perspective, it is meant to strengthen your ability to place today’s headlines into historical context, evaluate what is most likely to happen next, and understand those oncoming events when they do occur.
Step by step, with attention to the viewpoints and motivations of each nation and leader involved, the course explores, over a 90-year span:
- growing American involvement in the Middle East
- the ongoing quest for political independence and self-mastery by Middle Easterners
- the difficulty the U.S. has experienced in weighing diverse and conflicting objectives in the region, especially as the Cold War against the Soviet Union intensified
- the increasing antagonism between Americans and Middle Easterners that came to such a shocking culmination on September 11, 2001.
Over and over again, these themes surface, expressed in the actions of characters in a history still being written as we watch. America’s presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush. George Kennan. David Ben-Gurion. Gamal Abdel Nasser. Mohammed Shah Pahlavi. Ariel Sharon. Yasser Arafat. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Menachem Begin. Saddam Hussein.
The course … Read the rest of this entry »