ABSTRACT
The European imperial powers—primarily Russia, Britain, and France—had gobbled up the Muslim world in the century and a half preceding the close of World War I. What the tsars seized, the commissars never gave up, for the Soviet empire assimilated the Muslim districts of the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia that lay in the Old Russian Empire. As early as 1947 the United States therefore offered to uphold the independence and integrity of all states beyond the Soviet ambit against the threat of direct or indirect Communist aggression; or, in the idiom of the Truman Doctrine, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” and to assist these peoples “to work out their own destinies in their own way.” Containment called for commitment, and in the Middle East the United States started out with an overwhelming initial advantage.
