The Middle East policies of the European powers during World War I and even more so during the war’s immediate aftermath have attracted a fair share of scholarly attention and continue to do so given the seminality of that period for the region’s political fate up to the present day. Traditionally, when studying the decision making processes underlying these policies, scholars have looked at foreign policy-makers’ actions as being shaped by rational assessments of their states’ (perceived) national and imperial interest based on strategic, economic, and political (including domestic) considerations. This paper suggests a different line of enquiry, taking an interest in the less immediately obvious pre-conceived notions, prejudices and preconceptions about the region, its peoples and its social institutions that some of these European foreign policy-makers might have harboured and, wittingly or unwittingly, brought to bear on their decisions. I intend to put this approach to the test by examining the deliberations of the British War Cabinet’s Eastern Committee, which was formed in March 1918 as an interdepartmental body with the task of formulating recommendations for Britain’s policy towards the Middle East. Headed by Curzon, its importance grew as the war came to an end and the committee started drawing up the policies Britain was to pursue at the impending Peace Conference. With this task accomplished, the committee was dissolved shortly before the conference began in January 1919. The minutes of the committee’s meetings together with various related papers form a very rich but focused and clearly delimited repository of texts for analysis. Thus, taking its methodological cues from critical discourse analysts such as T. A. van Dijk and N. Fairclough, while also drawing on writings by A. Calder, R. Irwin, J. Massad and E. Said, the paper intends to shed light on how romanticising notions of Middle Easterners as well as contemporary discourses of civilisation, religion, culture, history, race, language, nation and modernity might have delimited the thinking about the Middle East and Britain’s role in its future of influential politicians, military men and ‘experts’ such as Curzon, Balfour, Montagu, Smuts and Cecil. By training the searchlight of the histoire des mentalités on foreign policy makers and their ‘contending visions of the Middle East’ this paper pursues a twofold aim. It hopes to enrich the practice of diplomatic history by suggesting further layers of analysis while also contributing to the debate about the ‘history and politics of Orientalism’.