Historical lessons for future U.S. foreign policy toward Iran and the Arab world

U.S. Foreign Policy and the Middle East

Just as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced United States into World War II, the attack on the World Trade Center during 9/11 forced the United States to find active and strategic ways to fight terrorism. With terrorism being born and bred in the Middle East every day, the United States needs to take a strong and effective stance on extremist and fundamentalist forms of terrorism. The best way for the United States to achieve this is by looking at the successful actions of its past when it comes to tricky foreign policy relations.

While many historians will attempt to compare and connect the Chinese revolution with the Russian revolution, that impulse is understandable, but misguided. "The Chinese revolutionists have, to the contrary, long despised their subjection to outside influences of Western imperialism and to what they took to be its alien culture. Their basic impulse was to liberate themselves from such outside influences. In short, China was a colonially dominated nation in a way Russia had not been" (Lifton, 171). In certain respects, one could argue that China's colonial domination was more akin to the domination that the United States, as a new nation, experienced from Britain and that the desire to achieve a certain degree of autonomy and self-determination was one of the motivating forces. Of course, it's important to keep in mind the distinction: once America achieved independence they did not attempt to transform the country into a Communist nation with strict governmental controls over the economy and land reforms. However, aspects of China's constitution after the revolution did express some of the sentiments that had been important to the United States: freedom of speech and assembly (Byrne, 76). In lieu of the consequences of the Chinese revolution, the United States should use those lessons to dictate their intentions with foreign policy today. For example, the United States should truly attempt to promote democracy in the Middle East. Additionally, the United States also used a policy of containment in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly under the leadership of Harry Truman, to block the spread of communism abroad. A clear example of this was the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a strategic opposition to Soviet strength. There's absolutely no reason why the United States can't emulate the strategies of the past and make a stronger united front with other countries in order to fight terrorism in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, regardless of whether the terrorism they practice be of the extremist or fundamentalist nature.

The United States should use its past actions as a guide for its future relations with the Middle East: notably the economic help it granted Japan after World War II should set a precedent for how it interacts with Iran and various Middle Eastern nations. For example, "From 1947 to 1951 the United States helped Japan rebuild its economy by providing aid, even food, worth about 1.8 billion. The Occupation authorities also helped the Japanese government overcome postwar economic chaos, especially rampant inflation, by balancing the government budget, raising taxes and imposing price and wage freezes, and resuming limited foreign trade" (Kesselman et al., 203). The U.S. aid not only helped to rebuild the country, but also ensured that Japan was stable enough so that renegade seedlings of Communism or comparable institutions didn't suddenly flourish. The United States should sue this wise historical strategy that it deftly employed to help the economies of poorer nations in the Middle East. When people are living in poverty, this makes them ripe breeding grounds for terrorism to build and people to be brainwashed by doctrines which vilify the West. Furthermore the United States should invest money in developing educational programs in the Middle East, so that the citizens there can actually envision a real future for themselves, without having to consider that terrorist training camps are the only way to achieve lasting success in one's life. Such actions would no doubt decrease the number of fundamentalist and extremist groups and give people greater intellectual depths to see through the often skewed and irrational logic which shapes such groups.