Coffee will be served at 3:30pm. The event will start at 3:45pm.
Talk
“Stability” and America’s Forever Empire in the Middle East
This talk draws from my book-in-progress, The Forever Empire: The Foundations and Longevity of American Power in the Middle East. The project received support from the Truman Library Institute’s Scholar Award and reconsiders the origins of America’s role in the Middle East during and after World War Two. Rather than interpret American policies as merely seeking to contain communism, the book considers how they laid the foundation for an imperial presence that would long outlive the Soviet Union. The book was inspired by a 2018 visit to the overseas headquarters of U.S. Central Command at al-Udeid in Qatar. It joins other scholarly critiques raised since the post-9/11 “forever wars” against the legacies of U.S. globalism and militarism. Hopefully, these critiques will contribute to a broader rethinking of American foreign policy. Hence the project’s tagline: “The first step is admitting you have an empire.”
The chapter critically examines the concept of “stability” as applied to the Middle East by assessing the implications for Syria of U.S. support for the 1949 coup of Col. Husni Za‘im. It juxtaposes American and Syrian domestic politics to show how Harry Truman’s administration sacrificed civilian rule and democracy in postcolonial Syria for the sake of Israel and the votes of its American backers.
Speaker
Nathan Citino is the Barbara Kirkland Chiles Professor of History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East and has written on the history of oil diplomacy and economic development, particularly in the Arab world.
Dr. Citino’s most recent book, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945-1967, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. It received the 2018 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is also the author of From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa‘ud, and the Making of US - Saudi Relations (Indiana University Press, 2002, 2nd ed. 2010). Dr. Citino has published articles in journals including Diplomacy & Statecraft, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Business History Review, Arab Studies Journal, and Cold War History. His essay on frontiers and borderlands appears in the volume Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. Dr. Citino graduated with a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.
About the International History Seminar
If you are interested in attending this semester’s events and joining the International History Seminar, please send an email confirming your interest to the Hayes Chair Graduate Research Associate at hayeschairgra@osu.edu, and you will be included on the mailing list going forward. Materials will only be pre-circulated to people on the mailing list.
