Salim Yaqub’s Imperfect Strangers offers a detailed account of US-Arab relations in the 1970s, weaving together analyses of high diplomacy, US politics, and American cultural perceptions. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding the past and present of the US’ relations with the Arab world.
Roughly half of the book focuses on US-Arab international relations, with separate chapters on US policy between the 1967 and 1973 wars, Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, the US approach to the Lebanese Civil War, and the Camp David Accords. By themselves, these chapters offer an excellent narrative of a pivotal period in US-Middle East relations at the state-to-state level. They synthesize and build on the most recent scholarship, and are meticulously researched.
Interspersed with diplomatic history are fascinating chapters that examine Arab-American relations through the lens of domestic American politics and popular culture. This is perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of the book. Yaqub presents much new and original research on topics like the growth of Arab-American advocacy groups, the surging popularity of political thrillers set in the Middle East, and even the cultural politics of the FBI's ABSCAM operation - the basis of the popular 2013 film American Hustle. Throughout the book, American perceptions of the Arab world are inextricably linked to perceptions of Israel. Imperfect Strangers suggests that the predominantly pro-Israel orientation of American politics and opinion in the early 1970s did much to damage American views of the Arab world. Skillfully linking diplomatic history with analysis of cultural change, the book shows that growing US commitments to the Arab-Israeli peace process helped to diffuse a pro-Israel verses pro-Arab dichotomy in US popular opinion by the end of the 1970s. Yaqub portrays this development as something of a paradox, and argues that even as Americans developed more nuanced views of the Arab world, the pro-Israel drift of US opinion consistently pushed US foreign policy to favor Israel’s interests over those of Israel's Arab interlocutors.
Imperfect Strangers also weaves in economic history and political economy. The book provides a particularly good overview of the investment of petrodollars in the US and the popular responses it provoked. However, Yaqub says less about US investments and business in the Arab world, whether those of oil companies (which saw their influence reduced by Arab nationalizations in the 1970s), or of US construction firms and defense contractors. Yaqub alludes to controversies in the 1970s over the energy and defense industries’ political ties to Arab states. A section on the evolving relations of US conglomerates like Bechtel, Chevron, or Lockhead Martin with the Arab world might have shed new light on these questions, and rounded out the fascinating discussion of petrodollars.
The historical profession thrives on discrete debates, as concrete sites to contest otherwise nebulous questions, and whether or not the author intended it, Imperfect Strangers wades fully into what international historians have recently termed the “Kissinger Wars,” over the diplomat’s enduring legacy. Yaqub falls clearly among the critics, portraying Kissinger’s Middle East diplomacy as either reactive or devoted to the narrow goal of protecting Israel from outside pressure to relinquish the territory it seized in 1967. This account of Kissinger’s diplomacy is plausible, but there are some equally feasible counterarguments. For one, there is the question of the relative importance of protecting Israel verses weakening Soviet influence in Kissinger’s Middle East policy. Obviously the two motives were generously intermixed, but Professor Yaqub gives much greater emphasis to the former goal over the later. Kissinger’s Soviet contemporaries, like Anatoly Dobrynin or Yevgeny Primakov, saw things differently, suggesting in their memoirs that Kissinger adroitly played the Arab-Israeli peace process (and exploited détente) in order to undermine Soviet influence in the region. They have a point, and 1976-77 marked something of a zenith in the US’ Cold War influence in the Middle East. This was partially due to lucky breaks, including Sadat’s realignment with the US. But Kissinger’s pursuit of a Cold War advantage over the USSR in the Middle East probably deserves more credit, and more emphasis, than Yaqub gives it. Imperfect Strangers may also be too quick to downplay as a mere Kissingerian deception operation the evidence that Kissinger was moving toward some sort of comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1975-1976, and away from his original strategy of dividing the Arabs.
Imperfect Strangers is the definitive book on US-Arab relations in the 1970s: hopefully the questions it raises will ensure it also lends itself to valuable and continued debate among historians. In any case, no overview of US-Middle East relations will be complete without grappling with its meticulously researched and artfully crafted arguments. Yaqub’s skillful interweaving of political and cultural history, meanwhile, establishes a new standard for bringing these sometimes conflicting approaches to the discipline into fruitful harmony.
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