In many ways, the Middle East increasingly looks like Central America, a region where the United States intervenes on occasion to shore up its interests and protect its clients. An important difference is that the Middle East has oil, a vital commodity that enables the United States to exert significant leverage over Europe and Japan.
In both regions, however, local grievances have either been ignored or subsumed under the more general rubric of the East-West conflict. In Central America, local problems were said to be the result of Soviet and Cuban interference. Similarly, in the Middle East, local and regional problems were dismissed as the results of Soviet interference in the region.
One of America's long-term objectives, enunciated in the Truman Doctrine (1947), has been keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Middle East has been for all practical purposes an American arena. Throughout this period, the USSR played only a peripheral role in the affairs of the region, yet local and regional problems were allowed to fester. Now that the Soviet Union is uninvolved in the Middle East, these problems continue. On occasion, they flare up into intense confrontations.
Traditionally, the United States has relied on Israel as the local gendarme who intervenes in regional affairs to alter or reshape politics to suit Israeli purposes. Increasingly, however, Israel's regional interests - as defined by the Israeli extreme Right - and American global interests seem to diverge, making it necessary for the United States to intervene directly. It did so in Lebanon in 1983, and it has recently done so again in the Gulf crisis. In either case, however, whether Israel or the United States intervenes, local conflicts and contradictions are exacerbated as a consequence.
Lebanon is a classic example of a conflict made worse because of Israeli and American intervention. In the Gulf, a resolution of the conflict by force will also complicate local and regional problems to the point where the whole region may in fact become "Lebanized," as Zbigniew Brzezinski recently put it in an article in the New York Times (October 7, 1990). The circle of conflict is likely to expand beyond Lebanon and Israel-Palestine to engulf the Arab and Islamic worlds.
It would be unfair to blame the Middle East's problems entirely on U.S. or Israeli intervention. Local elites have allowed contradictions to go unresolved to the point where the whole area has become a political volcano. Throughout Arab history, a dynamic tension has always pitted particularistic tendencies against more universal ones. Thus, for example, the tendency of the Middle Eastern states to pursue policies that promote their own special interests has always been measured against an informal set of universal standards and Pan-Arab national concerns.
In the post-Second World War era of independence and nationalism, the charismatic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser articulated the national pan-Arab concerns. These issues included championing the Palestinian cause and freeing the region from foreign interference. Arab nationalist themes were offered in the context of the colonial era and were focused on driving British and French influence from the Middle East. Following independence, however, the political map drawn by the colonial powers
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