From the Quincy Pact to the Trump Doctrine

For over eighty years the U.S. has remained one of the most influential players in the Middle East: it has prompted important trends in the development of political, economic and socio-cultural life in the Middle East, manifesting itself in various forms, from military interventions and diplomatic initiatives to cultural and economic ex-pansion as well as giving rise to new hotbeds of armed conflicts and social protests. This article is an attempt to “inventory” key milestones of U.S. policy in this region, to understand the logic of its formation and to identify principal drivers of this policy. The authors argue that over the past ten years, five key parameters that determined American policy in the region at previous stages have changed. This pushes the U.S. leadership to elabo-rate on some new formula of “sufficient presence” which, on the one hand, would imply a reduction in U.S. obligations to its regional allies but, on the other, would still allow the United States to maintain its political influence and save the regional system of alliances necessary to promote its interests in the new era. Searching for answers to a number of questions remains on the agenda of all presidential administrations: how to combine the declared goals with the available resources; how to strike a balance between values and pragmatic considerations; how to correctly select the tools for working with allies and how to receive from them more than give. This is also influenced by the domestic politics and particular features of each of the presidential administrations

Doctrine · Economics · Foreign policy · Law and economics · Middle East · Pact · Political science · Politics · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts