| Summary/Abstract |
Why is there no security in the heart of the Muslim world or its geographic proxy, the greater Middle East (ME)? This paper focuses on the role of the United States in creating a regional regime of insecurity that governs the behavior of all states and their proxies, including the United States. Invoking the idea of “regime” implies that security or insecurity is relational, interactional, and regional, meaning that multiple actors create it as each identifies and relates to others as friends or foes. This relationality suggests the United States is neither the cause of regional insecurity in the ME nor controlling the outcomes of the regime it has instituted. Focusing on the region as a unit of analysis, the article suggests that regional security cannot by reduced to the characteristics of any singular state such as its regime type, leadership style, sectarian tendency, resource curse, or even foreign alignment, as the mainstream literature often does. Using a qualitative method of discourse analysis based on texts produced by the American Foreign Policy Establishment (AFPE), this article questions the viability of America's long-term strategic posture or lack thereof in the ME.
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