Who makes American foreign policy in the Middle East? While it may seem like the president's foreign policy team conceptualizes and carries out policy, the range of legitimate options available to any policymaker is much more limited. In this paper, we offer an argument as to why. First we use social network analysis to explore the range of people and organizations who are consulted about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Proximity and organizational ties are much more important in these discourses than the actual range of expertise that is available to policymakers. We then incorporate results from a novel survey of journalists and Middle East scholars to map different pathways of ideational capture and how such paths can constrain policy options. Finally, we perform a discourse analysis of news media surrounding four cases of U.S. foreign policy crises in the Middle East from 1990-2015 and find that here too, a relatively small group of people is referenced repeatedly. We argue that the primacy of a small number of DC-based think tanks with a minute range of acceptable policy ideas tends to reduce the portfolio of possible policies with respect to the Middle East. It also tends to reproduce status-quo policy-making in the region, which is uniquely militarized and leads to patterns of American involvement -- from direct military intervention to arms sales -- that have led to sub-optimal policy outcomes. We conclude by offering advice to both policymakers and academics to overcome the effects of ideational capture towards encouraging more multifaceted views to inform policy choices.