Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite - Softcover

Kaplan, Robert D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0028740238 ISBN 13: 9780028740232

Publisher: Free Press, 1995

Synopsis

Here is the untold story of an inbred, gifted, and powerful elite of families and friends who dominated America's relations with the Middle East for over a century. Known to Foreign Service colleagues as "the Arabists, " these were the men and women who had spent much of their lives, usually with their families, living in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, and educators. Descended from the missionaries, scholars, and explorers who first ventured into the region - an offshoot of the WASP elite that ruled America during the nineteenth century - the Arabists were an exclusive caste linked by complex social, institutional, and family ties. Thoroughly at home in Arab cultures and often enjoying relations of longstanding intimacy with the monarchs and ruling elites of Arab countries, these American expatriates lived a charmed lifestyle that has become a source of intense nostalgia among the Arabists themselves as well as a symbol of their romance with Arab culture and increasing isolation from American society and interests. The Arabists dominated American policy and shaped our perception of the Arab world throughout the colonial and interwar periods. But after World War II, the diplomatic corps began to change, reflecting the country's new ethnic and social diversity. Kaplan describes the impact of this change within the State Department, showing how the advent of Irish Catholics, Jews, and Harvard-trained regional experts created internal pressures that slowly loosened the Arabists' grip on Middle East diplomacy in the postwar period. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the hundred-year history of theArabist elite, and traces their decline against the background of this social transformation.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

An analysis of the evolution of US policy toward the Middle East--as well as of the foreign-policy elite that guided it--that goes far deeper than the headlines. America's concern with the Middle East, says Kaplan (Soldiers of God, 1990, etc.), began in the 19th century with the missionaries who braved great hardship, with little success, to bring the Christian message to the area. Eventually, these missionaries concluded that education might be the best way of proselytizing--a conclusion that Kaplan calls ``probably the most inspired idea in the history of foreign aid.'' More sustained American interest in the Middle East developed only after WW II, and much of the subsequent history of the ``Arabists'' is tied up with Truman's decision to recognize the State of Israel despite the almost universal opposition of his foreign-policy advisors-- opposition that, according to Truman, smacked of anti-Semitism. Kaplan, himself Jewish, handles this controversy evenhandedly, and notes that then-Assistant Secretary of State Loy Henderson was remarkably prescient about the aftermath of our recognition of Israel: decades of constant trouble and expense, as well ``the rise of fanatic Mohammedanism'' of a kind ``not experienced for hundreds of years.'' In tracing the controversy over recognition, Kaplan relies particularly on interviews with leading Arabists, and he gives vivid pictures of an elite whose skills were developed by the sheer difficulty of mastering Arabic but who nonetheless have been regarded by critics like Francis Fukuyama as ``more systematically wrong'' than any other branch of the foreign service. The Arabists' story, Kaplan says, is one of dramatic successes (e.g., the extraction of the Falasha Jews from the Sudan, revealed here in all its truth perhaps for the first time) but of great failures as well (for instance, the failure to predict the true aims of Saddam Hussein). Full of fascinating, sometimes brilliant, insight into the politics of the area and its impact on those entrusted with US policy. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Kaplan turns his attention to the myths and realities of the State Department's Arabists: "men and women . . . who read and speak Arabic and who have passed many years of their professional lives . . . in the Arab world." Tracing the origins of the Arabist tradition to the Protestant missionary families who established schools and hospitals during the nineteenth century in Beirut, Cairo, eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Saudi peninsula, Kaplan contrasts the idealism of Americans' initial involvements with the Arab world with the imperial machinations of "sand-mad Englishmen" such as T. E. Lawrence. After World War II, Arabists whose families had lived in the Middle East for generations hoped for stronger ties between the U.S. and the young Arab nations; however, the cold war and U.S. support for Israel dashed their hopes. The Arabists blends graceful, empathetic portraits of specific individuals with succinct descriptions of developing trends in U.S. politics and diplomacy and Mideast relations up to the Gulf War. A thoughtful, reflective analysis of a subject painfully immersed in controversy. Mary Carroll

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0028740238
• ISBN 13: 9780028740232
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 367