The Jewish-American, now Israeli, historian Michael Oren has written a fascinating volume. It has been criticized by some as overripe with narrative and lacking analysis, but my reaction has been different. Not only is Power, Faith and Fantasy an enjoyable read, from the Barbary pirates of the 18th century to Israel's maturity, but Oren's history is the essential underpinning of a bold assessment of the roots of U.S. Middle East policy and their profound influence on Washington's policy-making today.

The present is incomprehensible to those who are ignorant of the past, as the painful machinations of the present Bush administration in Iraq demonstrate so well.

The three words of the title, power, faith and fantasy, say it all. These themes, often contradictory and conflicting, permeate the text, and have always been there as Americans over the centuries attempted to reconcile principle and emotion with self-interest.

Religion, which brought many of the first Europeans to the New World, was the primary instrument. These immigrants' ability to practise their faith-tradition unhindered defined them and redefined their beliefs. They came to see themselves as another "chosen people," granted a covenant with the responsibility of exporting a faith heavily influenced by Old Testament tradition.

Most early American contact with the people of the Middle East resulted from Christian missions. Missionaries heading east brought with them restoration theology: The Jews must return to Israel to fulfill scriptural requirements, which would in turn permit Christ, the Messiah, to walk the Earth again. The restoration imperative, for example, resulted in several attempts to establish Jewish farming communities in the Holy Land, all of them spectacularly unsuccessful until the self-generated movement of early Zionists to the kibbutz.

Despite its failure, restoration thinking has persisted undiminished, and is as powerful today as it has ever been. It is the essential element in the faith system of many U.S. evangelicals and fundamentalists who vigorously support the current administration's now-flagging neo-conservatism. For them, Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967 was an act of divine intervention aimed at provoking the messianic age, the Second Coming.

The sense that Americans were enjoined by the Divinity to protect Jerusalem and Israel is so ingrained that it is as difficult to imagine the United States turning its back on the Jewish state as it is to imagine the Muslim faithful turning theirs on Mecca. Oren tells us that perhaps only two presidents in U.S. history, Eisenhower and Nixon, felt unburdened by the pull of restoration theology, despite the latter's Quaker upbringing. It would not be until the World Wars, particularly the Second, that the Zionist lobby became a significant motivating factor in determining U.S. policy.

Given Oren's Zionist credentials, some question whether his overriding thesis of fantasy and Christian faith has been exaggerated for political ends, to deflect attention from the U.S. Jewish lobby and its relationship with the political elites in Washington.

According to Oren, this presidential proclivity toward the messianic was encouraged by the long-established, if often unspoken belief that Islam was a lesser religion, rife with ignorance and primitivism, unresponsive to the Christian message of salvation. Early travellers were aghast at the misuse of the land by its nomadic inhabitants, its over-grazing and over-hunting. All grist for the mill. Oren sees the same bias today, albeit on a considerably more cerebral level, in the work of Bernard Lewis, whom he calls the Orientalist par excellence, and in Samuel Huntington's seminal text, The Clash of Civilizations.

Faith and exposure gave birth to Oren's second theme: fantasy. This too began early, stemming also from very real commercial interests. Americans in the 1770s and '80s had to contend with the Barbary pirates, who hampered the new republic's earliest trading relationships in North Africa. Ships were attacked, boarded and hijacked. American crews were sold into slavery, possibly to be ransomed, possibly to spend the rest of their lives as the property of an exotic and suspect people.

Coupled with Muslim rejection of Christian teaching from missionaries who believed they held the keys to the kingdom, the fantasy grew, sustaining itself through an entire genre of literature and mythmaking. Fascination and repulsion reinforced each other in the land of A Thousand and One Nights, through the mysteries of the harem, in the world of the overwhelmingly popular 1953 Broadway musical Kismet, to George Clooney's movie Syriana and its like. Many of these are characterized by the infusion of a dangerous but beguiling eroticism.

The second most popular book on early U.S. bookshelves, after the Bible, was indeed A Thousand and One Nights. Oren quotes passages from an 18th-century translation verging, he says, on the pornographic. He imagines the effect this "overdose" likely had on New England puritans and Southern plantation owners.

On perhaps a less suspect note, I myself remember well, as a young boy, an exotic front-and-centre label on every package of coffee carried in the supermarkets of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (today mundanely known as the A&P). This image, which sticks so vividly in my mind, is of an Arab sheik, in silhouette, on his camel, navigating through the palm trees of a never-ending desert.

The Barbary wars had consequences other than feeding fantasy. They underlined a fundamental disequilibrium, which continues full throttle today: the requirements of realpolitik contending with emotion. Despite the commitment of the U.S. Founding Fathers to isolationism and their abhorrence of imperialism, they had to protect their national interests. The requirement to maintain their maritime trade preoccupied the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, as delegates from Massachusetts, South Carolina and Georgia successfully argued that the creation of a navy was a sine qua non for U.S. prosperity.

Oren ably carries this theme forward in time, including a fascinating chapter titled From Bibles to Drill Bits. Eager to break the European monopoly over Middle Eastern oil, in 1921, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, pulled together the seven leading U.S. oil companies to confront their competitors. He succeeded in forcing them into a cartel to be called the Iraq Petroleum Company. In return for forfeiting their right to explore outside the company's framework, the Americans received 23.75 per cent of all petroleum extracted from the Middle East.

This realism sits uneasily with the emotion-laden underpinnings, which put the White House in contention with the State Department, but interventionist leaders have routinely used faith as justification for their ambitions.

Despite some unevenness and fraying toward the end, Oren's book provides a unique opportunity to understand, in a profound and nuanced way, why Americans act the way they do. Their long fascination with things Middle Eastern, and their attempts to reconcile power, faith and fantasy, make for compelling reading.

Michael Bell, the Paul Martin Senior Scholar on International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor, has served as Canada's ambassador to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Jordan.