ABSTRACT
When looking at the politics of, the victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2016 US presidential election was considered surprising by many liberals in the United States and also by foreign stakeholders. Trump's rhetoric on Iran has also been mostly silent since McMaster became the new dominant strategist in the Trump administration – but even this might change. The more that the United States is perceived as being empire-like, the more United States foreign policy increases in complexity in response to transformations of the domestic political economy. As a relatively young global power challenged by the Soviet Union, the United States needed to maintain its presence in the region to contain the communist threat as well as to control the petro-political economy in order to meet domestic market demand. In the 1930s and 1940s, the map of the Middle East was reconfigured based on the political economy of a United States national security strategy.
