America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative

‘The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development ...’ (Point XII of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 8 Jan. 1918). This ‘autonomous development’, or ‘self-determination’, quickly became the cornerstone of American post-war foreign policy. As a former colony, the United States sought to portray itself as a benevolent power which would work for the benefit of those enslaved by colonialism and imperialism. The war marked a turning-point as the hegemony of the old European powers started to crumble, and new, energetic powers rose on the world stage—in the new world, America, with its unbridled capitalism which had conquered the prairie in the preceding century, and on the outskirts of Europe, the Soviet Union emerging as the state of the workers in the ruins of House Romanov. Indeed, the term ‘self-determination’ had first been used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a political slogan for the national minorities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The adoption of the Bolshevik term by Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth President of the United States, gave the impression that he sought to reshape the post-war world into a fairer and more just place

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