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.

Incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes manipulate elections in a variety of ways in order to retain power. One of the arenas for manipulating elections and ensuring regime survival is the fiscal institution. Using a time-series analysis of the Iranian budgetary process from 1979 to 2014, this study shows that: 1) following the political rift between reformists and conservatives, the incumbent hard-liners have systematically increased public spending before elections, and 2) when the legislature’s composition is more balanced between the hard-liners and soft-liners, budget revisions required by the parliament tend to be more than when the legislature is dominated by hard-liners. The evidence on electoral budget cycle becomes most evident in 2009 when the ruling coalition approved the annual budget proposal with only 18 revisions compared to an average of 150 in previous years, turning the 2009 public budget into the President’s discretionary budget. Fiscal manipulation and discretionary public funds were not only used to direct resources into the rural strongholds of the regime to buy votes, but to reinforce the para-military forces within the regime. These findings have important implications for the literature on institutions in electoral authoritarian regimes and explain the use of economic policies rather than more blunt forms of manipulation such as electoral fraud and violence against the opposition in these regimes.

This paper revisits the momentous developments, known later as the ‘Middle East crises,’ in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan during the revolutionary summer of 1958 through the lens of key American intelligence organizations and Embassies. More specifically, this paper explains how American officials in different Arab capitals and Washington interpreted local developments in Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan leading up to the joint Anglo-American landings in mid-July 1958. The period preceding Anglo-American intervention was marked by a political crisis later turned civil war in Lebanon, political unrest in Iraq which set the stage for the Free Officers revolt on 14 July 1958, and a political crisis in Jordan that eventually led to a coup attempt by the Jordan Arab Army against the monarchy. Drawing from newly declassified American intelligence and diplomatic records and archival evidence from Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Great Britain, this paper argues for a novel understanding of the foundations of American policy in the Middle East during the 1950s and in particular at the height of the Arab Cold War in 1958. This understanding is crucial for explaining the relationship between intelligence and policy at one of the most important junctures in the history of Arab-American relations and the Middle East.