Most Americans, Westerners, and Muslims nowadays tend to assume that U.S. foreign policies toward the Middle East in the post-1945 era were focused unflaggingly on the suppression of indigenous Arab nationalist movements and on support for the creation of the Zionist state of Israel. This widespread perception is not only grossly simplistic but also largely incorrect for the 1940s and early 1950s, as Hugh Wilford—a historian at California State University, Long Beach, specializing in Cold War–era intelligence activities—documents in his latest book. During that era, as in earlier decades, influential elements within the U.S. foreign policy establishment openly promoted the decolonization of the region, even at the risk of alienating its wartime allies Great Britain and France. These U.S. officials were both sympathetic to and often covertly supportive of a new generation of local nationalist leaders and movements that were agitating for Arab independence and self-determination. The pro-Arab or “Arabist”...

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