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THE background to the emergence of US policy towards the Middle East region warrants a brief explanation. Ann Patterson, an American diplomat, who served in the Middle East for over 40 years and then at the United Nations, said: ‘There is no place when they clash more than in the Middle East — our values and our interests.’ To her and many others, the Middle East politics forces some of the hardest choices on the US government. Looking back a century ago, after WWI, the United States had big plans for the Middle East.

President Woodrow Wilson’s famous ‘Fourteen Points’ vision outlined his ambitions for a post-war diplomatic order based on the rights of self determination and democracy. He dedicated this one point to the former Ottoman Territories in the Middle East. This generated huge welcome at the time for American engagements in the Arab world and in the Middle East. Of course, part of that was that they were not British. They were not French. They were coming from what they saw as an anti-colonial background, with promises for self-determination.

Looking back to that era, before the United States entered WWI, the United Kingdom and France had secretly divided up the Middle East between them. With its isolationist sentiments rising domestically after the war, the United States did not push back against the Anglo-French axis. As a result, the United Kingdom and France dominated the region for over two decades. Only after the WWII did the US get back into the Middle East in the context of the ‘cold war’. Since that period, the United States has used its military, economic, diplomatic and soft-power tools to influence its agenda under the cold war context.

Thus suddenly, the United States had new context interests around the world. As armies and economies shifted from ‘coal to oil’ and as Middle East oil production increased, the Middle East became a decisive battle ground in the much larger global competition. In 1980, in his state of the union address president Jimmy Carter said: ‘Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf will be considered a threat to vital interests of the United States of America, and as such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.’

Those words by president Carter came to be known as the ‘Carter doctrine’ and they changed everything about the way the United Staes engaged with the region. Once Carter spoke, the bureaucratic wheels began to turn and Pentagon priorities changed- with the creation of new headquarters, like the US Central Command, military exercises, negotiation for new base rights, and over flight rights, and the planning for a US military intervention that had not existed before.

Energy security or more specifically, oil reserves of the Gulf mattered most because of the US dependence on foreign oil. Furthermore, US support for Israel also became another pillar in Middle East politics. Because of the Gulf countries close relationship with the Soviet Union, during the 70-80 decades, US politicians saw Israel as a like-minded strategic partner surrounded by adversaries.

The Middle East countries felt betrayed by the shift of US policy overtime. Because of the American’s flip and support for the Zionist movement and also the state of Israel, at the expense of the Palestinian statehood, serious backlash happened in the entire Arab world population. Most significant in this development was the fact that the United States came to realise that it no longer needed the support of the majority of the people of these Arab nations — it just needed the leaders who rule these countries.

For more than 50 years, and especially since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, US policies and initiatives in the Middle East rested on a complex network of relations with four diverse regional pillars: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt. At one time or another, the United States worked with one or more of these states to contain the perennial fires ravaging the region (even when these same states ignited the fires in the first place, whether Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Israel in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, or Turkey in Iraq or Syria). Over the past decade, if we assess the situation in the Middle East, we see that the two-state solution has long been dead, and the extremists in charge of Israel today are on a mission to formally annex all the Palestinian territories under their control.

More and more, US involvement in the region has resulted in greater degree of destabilisation. The US economic policies in the region have been criticised for exacerbating inequality and poverty. The United States has always supported and incentivised free-market policies in the region, which have resulted in the privatisation of state-owned industries and the fast track deregulation of markets.

These policies have been regarded as benefiting multinational corporations at the expense of local populations resulting into fueling resentment toward the US. The spread of western style democracy and secularism has been seen as threatening to Islamic values and tradition. Overall, oil, religion, support to authoritarian regimes, military interventions, political interference and support for Israel have contributed to the anti-US environment in the region.

Having noted the historic domination of the repressive autocratic governments in the Middle East countries that have long denied the aspirations for political freedom and democratic order to their people, it is interesting to note that official support to the Palestine’s statehood by these countries has been limited to deceptive rhetoric and symbolic gestures so as to avoid confrontation with Israel and its backer, the United States.

While this has been detrimental to the Palestinian struggle and popular Arab solidarity with it, it has enabled Arab governments to devote their energies to their own survival amid the myriad of political, economic, and social ailments they continue to face. In this context, the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s comment that Washington held ‘99 per cent of the cards in the Middle East’ speaks volume.

Understanding the US financial, non-financial and political influence in the Middle East would be crucial to grasp the extent to which the entire Arab countries are beholden to the United States dictates. According to the US congressional research Service Report 2023, since 1946, the United States has provided $372 billion in foreign assistance for the Middle East and North Africa region, comprising Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emnirates, West Bank/Gaza and Yemen. The US foreign policy goals for the region are containing Iranian influence, countering terrorism and promoting Israel-Arab peace.

The US provides the bulk of the foreign aid for three countries — Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Most US military aid to Israel, Egypt and Jordan finances the procurement of weapons systems and services from the US defence contractors. Furthermore, since 1946, only Israel (140b), Egypt (80b) and Jordan (28b) combined have received $248 billion. For 2024, the US administration seeks to provide Israel 44 per cent, Egypt 19 per cent and Jordan 19 per centof the total allocation in the entire MENA region.

In order to understand the US influence on Jordan’s policy towards other Arab neighbours like Israel and Palestine, we must look into its dependency on the US finance. US assistance to Jordan accounts for over 40 per cent of the total amount of official aid the kingdom receives annually. The current US-Jordan agreement represents the largest multi-year foreign assistance commitment ($10.15b for seven years) to the kingdom.

The case with Egypt’s dependence on the US resources is more glaring. Successive US administrations have justified aid to Egypt as an investment in regional stability, built primarily on long-running cooperation with the Egyptian military and on sustaining the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. This year Egypt collected $1.4b in bilateral assistance. In addition, Egypt, Jordan and other regional countries receive US financing for scientific cooperation with Israel that funds joint Israeli-Arab research on topics relevant to regional development in the water, agriculture, environment, and health sectors. USAID reports that each of such project includes at least one partner institution in Israel working with counterparts from the Arab neighbours (eg Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, West bank and Gaza).

Then there is Middle East Multilaterals programme, a US state department-managed programme funded through the Economic Support Fund that supports initiatives aimed at promoting technical cooperation between Arabs and Israelis on issues such as water scarcity, environmental protection, and renewable energy.

Although the Abraham Accords that came into being three years ago aiming to normalise relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, the US administration has provided US security, diplomatic, or economic incentives for most of the countries in question. For example, the US-Israel partnership and Abraham Accords Enhancement Act 2023 aim at expanding people-to-people ties between Israel and other countries in the Middle East so as to further the goal of expanding and deepening the goals of Abraham Accords. USAID resources are made available for this purpose. In short, virtually the entire Middle East has become dependent on the US financial and non-financial policy framework.

Then there is the deadly and punitive US policy of sanctions. Countries in the Middle East constitute the majority facing such sanctions. Former President Obama expanded the sanctions on Syria, Iran, and Lebanon, and reinstated sanctions in Libya with instructions to new ones in Somalia and Yemen. The pretexts for these punitive measures which inflict harm on the peoples of this region are not new. The design and implementation of sanctions, however, has evolved overtime. Financialisation, which led to the increased use of financial instruments in mediating world economic exchange, coupled with the privileged position that US finance enjoys within the money markets, has enabled Washington to deliver maximum impact at minimum cost.

Dollar dominance is itself tied to another persistence feature of the political economy of the Middle East, which is the dependence of the energy sector. Heavy reliance on the production of oil that is priced and traded in dollars (petrodollars) makes Middle Eastern states particularly vulnerable to US financial sanctions. We may recall here that following the fiasco of 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2011 Arab uprisings, the US expanded the umbrella of financial sanctions-as an alternative to large scale military action-against state and non state actors across the region. It is to be noted here that despite the decline in US economic power, both in terms of its relative GDP and as a share of world trade, dollar dominance remains largely unchallenged.

In the above discussions, the issues covered have widespread impacts constituting tremendous influence of the United States on Middle East region’s politics and economy, because of which it has become nearly impossible for Israel’s Arab neighbours to fulfil their obligations towards a just and morally acceptable solution of the Palestinian statehood. The failure of the Islamic world in adopting a powerful declaration of actions against Israel in the Summit meeting two weeks back is a testimony to the US supremacy over the Arab political discourse.

Humayun Kabir is a former senior United Nations official in New York.