The Privilege of Acting upon Others: The Middle Eastern Exception to Antiexceptionalist Histories of the United States and the World

The study of the United States and the Middle East is one obvious site to interrogate the strengths and limitations of the recent transnational turn of American historiography.   Nowhere else in the world are the power, stakes and nature of U.S. empire today more obvious than in the Middle East.  Nowhere else is U.S. military deployment as aggressively manifest.  Precisely because of the massive ideological, economic, political and military investments made by the United States in the region, and because of the extraordinary pervasiveness of orientalist stereotypes across American culture and media, and because of the violent “anti-American” resistance that emanates from the region, the study of the relationship between the United States and the Middle East remains an area that constantly tests the ability of American historians to think outside of a nationalist frame.  It is one thing to discuss empire in the abstract; quite another thing to do so at a time of seemingly unending war.  Leaving aside the open-ended “war on terror” that has seen the U.S. bomb Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia in the past decade, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have precipitated the longest running wars in America’s history.  The study of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and so-called “political Islam,” in turn, raise difficult and discomforting questions for anti-exceptionalist (if this is the proper term) historians because they are conflicts that also rage, often violently, in the present.  They therefore often demand ethical, moral and political positions that are not easy to reconcile with the notion of academic neutrality. Arguably in no other subfield than U.S.-Middle Eastern history has the persistent conventionality of American foreign relations been more obvious—and thus the ramifications for the transnational turn among diplomatic historians as potentially significant.