The Post-9/11 U.S. Foreign policy towards the middle east: catalyst or hindrance for the democratization of the region?

It has become common practice among IR scholars to take the 9/11 events as a watershed that generated a shift in the US foreign policy towards the Middle Eastern area. And indeed, the Bush administration has stressed the mutation of its foreign policy logic: a new peril was looming over US, and this time it consisted no longer of rogue states, but of terrorist sub-state actors. Subsequently, a causal link was established between the authoritarian nature of most Middle Eastern regimes that prohibited extremists any political space, thus determining the latter to engage in terrorist activities in the West. The US’ conclusion was that the compromise that had long endured between it and some of the Middle Eastern authoritarian- but friendly- regimes was subordinated to a new priority: the democratization of the region.

The problems around the democratization of the Middle East are as intricate as they seem “spectacular.” And when to this conundrum we add the external agency of the US, the equation becomes even more entangled. Yet it must be emphasized from the very beginning that the reason why the topic of the US Foreign Policy in the Middle East constitutes a subject of in-depth exploration in the present paper goes well beyond the alarming and sensational nature of front-page headlines.

What, then, is the rationale for choosing to scrutinize whether the US policy towards the Middle East will do more harm than good for the democratization of the region? First and foremost, the matter poses a multilateral challenge for a scholar that seeks to surpass the beguiling and poignant rhetoric of both US and Middle Eastern actors, simplistic analyses that reduce the issue to a “clash of civilizations” and reciprocal prejudices embedded in the texture of public opinions, all radicalized by the 9/11 events. Under these circumstances, the present problem will have a bi-focal structure, aiming to strike a balance by delving in an equally profound manner both into the segment pertaining to US policy-making and, alternatively, into the Middle Eastern reality.
Gabriel Horia Nasra