US in the ME: Applied Hist

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

If hindsight is 20/20, why don’t foreign policymakers turn to historians more often? “America in the Middle East: Studies in Applied History” is an interactive seminar that equips the next generation of foreign policy practitioners with the knowledge and skills needed to identify, understand, and apply lessons from a century of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. We begin by examining how foreign policymaking is, at its core, an act of historical interpretation—a process by which policymakers, both consciously and subconsciously, draw on the past to inform their decisions about the present and future. We then review a series of policy initiatives that have defined America’s role in the Middle East, identify the historical assumptions that underpinned those choices, and evaluate how readings (and misreadings) of the past shaped their strategic outcomes and long-term consequences for both the region and the United States. In the second half of the course, students apply this historical mindset to analyze challenges the United States faces in the Middle East today. These include Great Power Competition and potential fallout from America’s strategic pivot to Asia; the rise and fall of regional powers; securing global access to energy resources; the impact of climate change on migration, security, and potential resource wars; the state of democracy and human rights; and how regional understandings of America’s historical role in the Middle East complicate ongoing efforts to establish an affirmative U.S. agenda. The instructor—a career foreign service officer at the Department of State with a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies—draws on more than two decades of experience in the region as a diplomat, academic, consultant, and journalist.