ABSTRACT
Most scholars assert that the United States (US) had three primary objectives in the Middle East during the Cold War: preserving the security of the state of Israel; maintaining a stable supply of the region’s oil resources to the West; and, partly in pursuit of those two goals, preventing the area from falling under the domination of a single power, especially the Soviet Union. Balancing short-term considerations with how their decisions could affect American interests over the long run was also a major challenge for US strategists. The challenges that US policymakers confronted were, moreover, compounded by the limits that international and domestic constraints imposed on them. US decision-makers, moreover, at times felt that the United States was poorly positioned to meet a Soviet challenge in the Middle East. American policymakers, moreover, had to operate under some very significant domestic constraints, particularly when it came to Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
