boarding a Tripolitan gunboat during the
First Barbary War, 1804 The United States' relationship with the
Middle East before
World War I was limited, although commercial ties existed even in the early 19th century, as seen with the
American–Algerian War. From 1801 to 1805, the U.S. fought against
Ottoman Tripolitania during the
Tripolitan War regarding tributary payment which president
Thomas Jefferson refused to pay. In 1833, President
Andrew Jackson established formal ties with the Sultan of
Muscat and
Oman. The Sultan saw the U.S. as a potential balance to Britain's overwhelming regional influence. In 1857, commercial relations opened between the U.S. and Persia, after Britain persuaded the Persian government not to ratify a similar agreement in 1851. After defeating the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain and France took control of most of its former territories. They held mandates to do so from the League of Nations. The United States refused to take any mandates in the region and was "popular and respected throughout the Middle East". "Americans were seen as good people, untainted by the selfishness and duplicity associated with the Europeans." American Christian missionaries brought modern medicine and set up educational institutions all over the Middle East, as an adjunct to their religious proselytizing. The United States also provided the Middle East with highly skilled petroleum engineers. Thus, there were some connections made between the United States and the Middle East before the Second World War. Other examples of cooperation between the U.S. and the Middle East are the
Red Line Agreement signed in 1928 and the
Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement signed in 1944. Both of these agreements were legally binding and reflected an American interest in control of Middle Eastern energy resources, mainly oil, and reflected an American "security imperative to prevent the (re)emergence of a powerful regional rival". The Red Line Agreement had been "part of a network of agreements made in the 1920s to restrict the supply of petroleum and ensure that the major [mostly American] companies ... could control oil prices on world markets". The Red Line agreement governed the development of Middle East oil for the next two decades. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement of 1944 was based on negotiations between the United States and Britain over controlling Middle Eastern oil. Below is shown what the American President
Franklin D. Roosevelt had in mind for a British Ambassador in 1944: Persian oil ... is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it's ours. converses with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt on board the
USS Quincy, in February 1945. On 8 August 1944, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement was signed, dividing Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. Consequently, political scholar Fred H. Lawson remarks, that by mid-1944, U.S. officials had buttressed the US position on the peninsula by concluding an Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement that protected "all valid concession contracts and lawfully acquired rights" belonging to the signatories and established a principle of "equal opportunity" in those areas where no concession had yet been assigned. Political scholar Irvine Anderson summarizes American interests in the Middle East in the late 19th century and the early 20th century noting that, "the most significant event of the period was the transition of the United States from the position of net exporter to one of net importer of petroleum." By the end of the Second World War, Washington had come to consider the Middle East region as "the most strategically important area of the world." and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history," argues
Noam Chomsky. Watson then continues, stating that "by the end of 1946 Palestine was the last remaining mandate, but it posed a major problem". In truth, this nationalistic political trend clashed with American interests in the Middle East, which were, as Middle East scholar Louise Fawcett argues, "about the
Soviet Union, access to oil and the project for a Jewish state in
Palestine". Hence, Arabist Ambassador
Raymond Hare described the Second World War, as "the great divide" in United States' relationship with the Middle East, because these three interests later served as a backdrop and reasoning for a great deal of American interventions in the Middle East, and came to be the cause of several future conflicts between the United States & the Middle East. In 2018,
Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of
Saudi Arabia, said that Saudi Arabia's
international propagation of the Salafi movement and Wahhabism campain was "rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the
Soviet Union." As of 2024, the United States has approximately 45,000 troops in the region, including approximately 2,500 troops stationed in Iraq, 900 troops stationed in Syria, and others stationed in Bahrain, Djibouti, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. About 15,000 of these troops were deployed to the region as part of a temporary surge after
7 October 2023, with the United States retaining about 30,000 troops until then. The troops are a fraction of the number the U.S. deployed in 2010, when it had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq, about 70,000 in Afghanistan and many more in neighboring countries. After 2015, the U.S. military presence in Iraq declined sharply; and all
U.S. troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2021. == Israel ==