2010 MESA Paper Proposal My paper brings together two important historical narratives, the history of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the rise of conservative political power in late 20th Century America. It examines how the American conservative ideologues responded to Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on how the American Right grappled with the rise of political Islam. Conservatives struggled to understand this ascendant ideology that rejected both western-style capitalist modernity and communism, and to decide whether its proponents were dangerous enemies of the West or potential allies in the Cold War. In the decades after World War II, American conservatives often subscribed to orientalist stereotypes and misperceptions of the Middle East. They viewed it as a backwards region of violence and instability, as a hotbed of third-world nationalists hostile to the West, and as a landscape of rich natural resources fueling American prosperity (although the rise of OPEC allowed Arab economic power to begin threatening American hegemony and affluence). Yet it was not until the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath that political Islam became central to American conservatives' perceptions of the Middle East. American foreign policy analysts struggled at first to understand the rise of the Islamists, because they did not easily fit into the Cold War paradigm of a binary world divided between two superpowers' respective spheres of influence. Militant Islam gradually came to be seen as a serious challenge to global modernization and westernization, American political and economic power, and U.S. national security. My study begins in 1978, when movement conservatives largely remained outside of prominent positions of power within the U.S. government. From the sidelines, they denounced President Carter's responses to the Iran hostage crisis and the conflict in Afghanistan as weak, indecisive, and overly conciliatory. Different factions within the emerging New Right coalition provided somewhat divergent perspectives about the Middle East and Islam. I analyze the views of three groups: mainstream conservatives (associated with National Review and the Republican Party), neoconservatives (former liberals on their way out of the Democratic Party coalition, in large part due to their hawkish foreign policy views), and the Religious Right (grassroots social conservative activists strongly influenced by conservative Christian theology). The election of Ronald Reagan brought conservative ideologues to power; I close my paper with a discussion of how their ideas influenced and altered U.S. policies in the Middle East.