This paper offers an international history of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, based on research in the U.S. archives and on Arab press sources and interviews gathered during research in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. In October 1973, the Arab petroleum-exporting nations enacted a series of production cuts in response to U.S. support for Israel in its war with Egypt and Syria. The production cuts were followed by a total embargo on oil exports to the United States. This paper argues that in instituting the embargo and production cuts, the Arab nations were not following a plan agreed upon in advance. The key Arab oil-producing states sought to avoid a total embargo until late in the second week of the war, and their policies were contingent on the outcome of the fighting and the U.S. diplomatic response. Inter-Arab politics were particularly important in this regard. As the war went on, the Gulf states came under increasing pressure from other Arab countries to use oil in the conflict, and were also under pressure to back up their own rhetoric of solidarity with Egypt and Syria. The United States had received numerous warnings of a possible embargo in the months leading up to October 1973, but during the war the Nixon administration disregarded these reports and pressed ahead with a massive effort to resupply Israel with arms. Nixon and Kissinger failed to take Arab warnings seriously because they believed that talk of the “oil weapon” was merely emotional or was designed for domestic political consumption, and they misinterpreted diplomatic signals from Saudi Arabia to mean that there would be no embargo. The Nixon administration was also motivated by concerns about American credibility in the Cold War, which they believed outweighed the threat of an oil crisis. The embargo had a great psychological impact on the United States, shocking Americans who were accustomed to cheap and abundant energy, while the production cuts were a major factor behind the skyrocketing price of oil from $3 per barrel in October 1973 to nearly $12 per barrel in December. Although the embargo did not succeed in forcing the United States to abandon Israel or compel Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, it had lasting consequences for the global oil market, and helped lead the United States to reevaluate its relationship with the Arab world and its role in the Middle East peace process.

America’s position toward the issue of Middle Eastern democracy has always been more nuanced than its rhetoric implies. The Arab uprisings that began in December 2010 added tensions to this dynamic as the Untied States government differentially emphasized democratic ideals and state interests for each of the Arab countries undergoing upheavals. Although analyses of U.S. policy in the region and anecdotal illustrations of its rhetoric abound, few research projects have systematically assessed U.S. public discourses with specific attention to the issue of Arab democratization—despite the steep upsurge of interest in the topic over the last decade. To address this gap, this paper provides a communication-based analysis of U.S. political discourse on Arab democratization since the end of the Cold War, revealing much about America’s consistent use of democratic rhetoric in the pursuit of sometimes inconsistent regional policy objectives. Specifically, I analyze and thematically classify more than two thousand texts over the past two decades, including presidential speeches, print and television news reports, and foreign policy journal articles. Three primary classifications of the discourse emerged over time, each of which is illustrated using contrasting themes that characterize the key perspectives within these debates. These are: (1) democratic rationales: realism and idealism, (2) democratic scrutiny: observation and proclamation, and (3) democratic expectations: optimism and pessimism. The paper closes with a discussion of the dominant patterns within the discourse organized according to three distinct rhetorical eras which I label: pragmatism (1991-2001), ideal internationalism (2002-2007), and pragmatic idealism (2008-2012). These eras represent the dominant governmental policies toward Arab democratization at a given time and are used to illustrate both the consistency and fluidity of key points of debate among politicians and pundits in the U.S public sphere. I conclude by discussing the mass media’s performance over the three eras and the issues of ideology and power prevalent in the discourse. Furthermore, I suggest some of the consequences caused by the strategic application of similar democratic language by different political actors pursing dissimilar objectives. Among these are an increased skepticism in the Middle East about U.S. democracy-promotion agendas and the creation of a particularly charged rhetorical environment through which current and future advocates of democracy in the region must now delicately tread.

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of domestic changes brought forth by the series of uprisings witnessed in the Arab world during 2011 on regional and international politics. Drawing on Malcolm Kerr’s Arab cold war model, the paper will explore the foreign policy dimension of the domestic changes occurring in the region and project the potential impact on regional and international alliances. Following the competition between Arab monarchies and socialist republics alluded to by Kerr in his 1965 bipolar model, the 20th century went on to witness the failure of socialism, which transformed the relationship between the monarchies and republics into one of pragmatism and cooperation. The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 triggered the rise of a third axis, Islamism, which competed with those two actors for people’s hearts and minds as well as for political influence. The Arab Spring has resulted in the breakdown of this triangle of power. The main thesis of this paper is that the “conservative monarchism-radical socialism-Islamism” triangle is being replaced with a new one, composed of the following political players: conservative monarchies, transitioning republics, and non-state Islamist groups. The key difference between the two triangles is that, post-Arab Spring, in addition to non-state Islamism, moderate Islamist parties, hitherto marginalized opposition parties, are emerging as mainstream political forces within the transitioning republics. Using a comparative foreign policy framework focusing on decision-making processes, positions taken by the different actors, and historical analysis of state and non-state actor behavior over the past 60 years (1952-2012), the paper aims to show how the three players in the new model are likely to be the region’s main competitors for influence and resources. The paper argues that this new model necessitates revisiting inter-regional dynamics in the Arab world as well as its international alliances. While certain transpiring dynamics are new, others almost resurrect the past. On the one hand, new patron-client relationships are emerging alongside established ones (such as the rise of Turkey’s regional role), but on the other hand, the old competition between conservative monarchies and republics is returning, albeit in a new form, as monarchies will largely be uncomfortable with democratic transitions in the region and seek in various ways to isolate and protect their own societies from them.

The historiography of Turkish-American relations has focused on the post-World War II period, during which relations between the two countries intensified because of a new, U.S. policy of containing the Soviet Union. According to this account, the origin of U.S. interest in Turkey can only be explained if approached through the framework of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Thus, this approach cannot speak of a U.S. "Turkish policy" prior to the declaration of the Truman Doctrine. This paper shows that, contrary to prevalent historiography, the foundations of the tight post-war Turkish-American relations were laid during the war, not only because of the Soviet threat, but because of a new U.S. global policy defined before the advent of the Cold War. U.S. postwar awareness of the Middle East in general and Turkey in particular derived not only from the events of the period 1945-1947, but also from U.S. experience accumulated during the war in the region. Events and conditions of the conflict itself resulted in American military and civilian specialists producing a mass of reports and strategic plans for the postwar Middle East, in which Turkey occupied a crucial position. The foundations of the new U.S. Turkish policy can be summarized in three themes: a new U.S. international trade policy; the American desire to extend its hegemony in the Near and Middle East; and the installation of bases overseas. These three elements were closely related: the U.S. policy of international trade and installation of overseas bases depended on American desire to extend its hegemony in the Near and Middle East. A very important point is how the United States was perceived by the state and people of Turkey. Turkey's history, the Ottoman experience of the First World War and the occupation of Turkish territory by European powers at the end of the war were all factors that influenced the perception of the United States by senior Turkish leaders. The Turks believed that U.S. capital and aid were innocent, unlike that of the others, and that the greatest of great powers was not driven by the selfish interests that Britain entertained in the region. In addition to this positive image of the United States, there was also the urgent need of Turkey for the technical and financial assistance of the United States. Thus the elements necessary to forge an American-Turkish alliance were in place in both countries.

This paper offers a rethinking of the nascence of Egypt’s 1950s foreign policy of positive neutralism, in light of previously untapped Arabic sources. While much attention has been paid to its application in Egypt’s relations with the superpowers, this paper asks: which actors and historical contexts shaped the development of positive neutralism, and to what extent was it a product of the Cold War context? The paper considers the period 1952-1955, from the rise to power of the Free Officers’ movement, to the formal adoption of positive neutralism by (later) President Gamal Abdel Nasser. It argues firstly that Egyptian neutralism did not issue from a stance on the superpower struggle, and certainly not one determined from the outset. Rather it was first articulated in the context of resistance to British colonialism. Secondly, this foreign policy developed in tandem with a nation building project, which was also dominated by an anticolonial rather than Cold War consciousness. Through the positive neutralism case study, this paper proposes that foreign policy and nation building were shaped in tandem by Egypt’s leadership, and cannot be fully understood unless analysed together. Throughout the 1950s, Egyptian leaders negotiated choices between the need for autonomy in foreign policy and for external assistance in developmental nation building. Accordingly, the paper traces the development of neutralism through two phases, within the British colonial and Cold War contexts respectively. First, neutralism was articulated against Britain’s control over the Suez Canal Zone and its regional defence proposals. Egypt practised neutralism by counterbalancing the US and its British ally, sustaining American assistance for a national project seeking to foster national industry, greater social equality, and pan-Arab cooperation. The second phase began in 1954-5, when the Baghdad Pact emerged as the latest Western-sponsored regional security framework, while the US kept assistance conditional on Egypt reaching a settlement with Israel. Opposing this primarily on anticolonial grounds, Nasser now further developed neutralist policy through relations with like-minded African and Asian leaders at the 1954 Bandung Conference. Similarly, it was not bipolarity but an Israeli raid in 1955 which led Nasser to the Eastern bloc in his search for arms, and alternatives to the developmental assistance denied by Washington. These conclusions are supported by analysing diplomatic documents from Egypt’s National Archives, alongside more commonly used British and American state records. The paper also examines politicians’ speeches and memoirs, interviews, as well as print media and radio archives.