Who knew that the term “Middle East” was coined by an American naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, in 1902? Or that the Statue of Liberty, the quintessential American icon officially named “Liberty Enlightening the World,” was originally titled “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia” and planned by sculptor F.A. Bartholdi to guard the entrance to the Suez Canal? Or that a Bush ancestor (also named George) as well as an ancestor of John Steinbeck served as Christian January/February, 2007 missionaries in Palestine, and both fervently believed the Jewish people should be aided in returning to their biblical homeland?

Cataclysmic events can open up new avenues of inquiry. In 2002, after the publication of Michael B. Oren’s authoritative Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, his editor asked him what essential work on the region had not yet been written. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 horrors, Oren readily answered, “the history of America in the Middle East.” He then set about filling the void, and this first onevolume account of U.S. involvement in the region is a masterpiece. The curious nuggets of information Oren turns up, illuminating and entertaining to be sure, are only a small part of the book’s importance. More significantly, Power, Faith, and Fantasy provides a rich and complex context for assessing America’s embattled role in the Middle East today. Initially a rather na.ve outsider, the U.S. became a secondary power, then the major power, and now a would-be enforcer of a Middle East Pax Americana.

Oren, an American-born and -educated Israeli who is currently a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, faced formidable obstacles in carrying out his project. Tracking U.S. undertakings in the Middle East over the entire sweep of American history required extensive research, much of it in sources not easily accessible, but the author and his assistants—whom he fulsomely acknowledges—persevered. It is unlikely that many relevant items, whether in manuscript, printed, or online, are missing from the volume’s 128 pages of Notes and Bibliography.

Another complication is the serious chronological imbalance in the secondary literature dealing with the subject. In contrast to the seemingly endless array of monographs on Washington’s policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and on the economic and geostrategic impact of the region’s oil during the past six decades, very little has been produced about the much longer stretch from the creation of the U.S. republic until World War II. Oren therefore made the wise decision to devote the bulk of his hefty book to the little-known earlier period. Recent history—for which many of the classified government documents have not, in any case, been released—receives relatively brief coverage. Although perceptive and vividly written, his final section thus doesn’t contain much that is new.

A third difficulty in doing a book of this kind is maintaining objectivity, since most of the discussion about U.S. endeavors in the Middle East breaks down into such dichotomies as West vs. East, democracy vs. theocracy, free expression vs. repression, Jew vs. Arab, and Christian vs. Muslim. Yet Oren shows hardly any trace of partisanship. He exudes great respect for Arab aspirations, Zionist accomplishments, and American values. Similarly fair treatment marks his lively portrayals of personalities.

The result is more than simply a survey of American diplomacy in the Middle East. Oren ambitiously examines America’s extensive religious interests and activities in the region, and the role ideas and images about the Middle East have played in U.S. elite and popular culture. His title, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, reflects the three prongs of the fast-paced narrative: American policymakers’ “civic mission as mediators and liberators,” including their contemporary effort to bring democracy and the rule of law to the area; the campaign by “churches and evangelical groups” to “save the region spiritually”; and the still widespread image, conveyed in American books and films, of “the mysterious, menacing Orient,” characterized by “the desert’s immutable beauty and the romance of its perambulant tribes”—not to mention the veiled Arab dancing girls who, Oren finds, have fascinated American men for over two centuries.

The work is studded with new interpretations questioning the common assumption that American history began to intersect with Middle Eastern affairs only in the 20th century. While Oren—perhaps influenced by recent events—opens himself up to the charge of going to the opposite extreme and exaggerating the centrality of the Middle East in the U.S. past, on balance the evidence appears to support him.

A previously neglected factor in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, we learn, was a crisis in the Middle East. Those who urged—and eventually secured—a stronger central government often cited the inability of the 13 states, under he weak Articles of Confederation, to devise a coordinated defense against the Barbary pirates. They routinely captured American vessels off the North African coast and held the crews for ransom. When it turned out that even the new Federal government, which had the power to take military action, did not have the means to stop these depredations, the young nation created the U.S. Navy. It finally brought them to an end in 1815, and a permanent U.S. fleet was stationed in the Mediterranean Sea.

A generation later, the Middle East figured in the American Civil War. Slavery in the Arab world, universally excoriated in the U.S. as exceptionally cruel, furnished a theme for the antebellum debate between Abolitionists, who compared U.S. slave owners to their Muslim counterparts, and Southerners, who saw no resemblance whatsoever. The Civil War disrupted American cotton exports, boosting those of Egypt, but the end of the conflict and the resumption of exports from the U.S. devastated the Egyptian economy, providing the spark, Oren argues, for the modernization of the Middle East’s most populous country. Furthermore, he shows, a good many former Union and Confederate officers found employment in the region, where they inculcated Western, and particularly American, ways of doing things in government, education and the armed forces that continued to influence countries there well into the next century.

Oren is an especially acute analyst of the role of American missionaries. Beginning in the 1820s, men and women determined to convert all Arabs to Protestant Christianity set out for the Middle East, only to encounter privation, resistance from local authorities, and scant interest from the putative beneficiaries of their endeavors. Unlike the European powers, the U.S. had no territorial ambitions in the area, so these preachers of the gospel became the pro-The New Leader totypical representatives of Americanism to generations of Arabs.

The missionaries were few in number, but their activities had momentous unintended consequences. For example, they became unwitting political hostages, since concern for their safety inhibited American actions that might upset Middle Eastern regimes. This consideration goes a long way toward explaining why the U.S. never declared war on the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

In addition, many of the missionaries were “restorationists,” proponents of the return of the Jews to Palestine, and hence the ideological progenitors of today’s pro-Israel evangelicals. Paradoxically, some of their children and grandchildren, enjoying the advantage of familiarity with the Middle East’s culture, later served as U.S. diplomats there. In many instances they replaced American Jews, who until the 1920s had been considered natural candidates for those posts because of their interest and local contacts.

Devoid of their ancestors’ concern for the Jews, the new breed of ambassadors and consuls in the Middle East became the 20th-century anti-Zionist State Department “Arabists.” Oren’s quotations from their letters and position papers opposing American support for the creation of a Jewish state barely differ in their arguments from the currently fashionable intellectual discourse that denies the legitimacy of Israel.

The most far-reaching effect of the missionaries was the network of educational institutions they founded, the best known of which evolved into the American University of Beirut. Although they failed to make their students Protestant Christians, the schools did inculcate an appreciation for democracy, patriotism and individual liberties. In the process they trained the emerging leadership of Arab nationalism that would, ironically, eventually oust the colonial powers and Western cultural influence from the region.

At the end of his historical narrative, Oren predicts the persistence of traditional patterns. “The themes that evolved over the course of more than two centuries of America’s interaction with the Middle East,” he says, “will continue to distinguish those ties, binding and animating them for generations.” But how should the U.S. record be evaluated? Only in an Epilogue does the author reveal what he thinks: “Americans historically brought far more beneficence than avarice to the Middle East and caused significantly less harm than good.”

The Arab hijackers who flew two planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11—the very spot, the book notes, “from where, 200 years earlier, the U.S.S. Essex had departed for America’s first war in the Middle East” against the Barbary pirates—vehemently disagreed. Today, so do a great many residents of the Middle East, Europe and, indeed, the U.S. And since it is through the prism of current events that historians reinterpret the past, there is a good chance the author of the next book on this subject will not be as sanguine as Oren.