Their geopolitical battle with Russia is rooted in Orientalist understandings of East vs West – justifies neo-colonial expansion in the name of “Westernization”

Orientalists divided the globe into a dualistic geography of East and West. In the European colonial era, the East or “the Orient” was understood to encompass half the world: Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The locus of “the West” was Western Europe, for while “the New World” was growing in economic and geopolitical prowess, Great Britain and France remained the greatest global and imperial powers of this era. Said describes Orientalism as “an imaginative geography,” which has always had less to do with the Orient itself than with fashioning “our world” (the West) by normalizing and naturalizing white European domination. Eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalists served colonial administrations by generating a “new awareness of the Orient” as ineradicably distinct from, and antithetical to, the West. Their rhetoric halved not only the land, but the peoples of the Earth as well, constructing “the Oriental” as “a member of a subject race and not exclusively an inhabitant of a geographical area.” Kumar elucidates, Orientalism is based upon a civilizational view of history, or “the idea that civilizations come into being, prosper, and then decline.” The presumed strength, rationality and superiority of Western civilization over that of the weak, barbaric and undeveloped Oriental implied a burden upon the West to “penetrate” and “give shape and meaning to” the Orient, both militarily/materially and culturally/discursively. Although the binary construction of East and West did not disappear, it was fundamentally altered after WWII, as the US and the USSR rose to geopolitical prominence at opposite ends of an emerging bipolar international order. Europe’s experience of physical and economic devastation left Western Europe in a state of decline, whereby trauma and overstretch forced European empires to substantially withdraw from their colonies. The US and the USSR sat in prime positions to fill this power vacuum, as each had industrialized economies, had achieved moral victory in allying against Germany, and was further detached from imperialism than European colonial powers. As the two nations rose, so did each’s fear and spite of the other, thus beginning the Cold War. This new framework gave rise to reformulated imaginations of “the East” and “the West,” whereby the former developed into primary affiliation with Russia, the latter into primary affiliation with America. As the center of power in the West shifted from Europe to the United States, the emerging network of US government intelligence agents and collaborating scholars gained a more significant bearing on dominant Western discourse, and specifically on the Western imagination of the Middle East and Islam. The image of a West and an East engrossed in a post-colonial “Cold War” looked very different than the West and East of colonial times, which had been fixed into a naturalized master/slave dichotomy. Under the old order, the West fancied itself a paternal figure with a divine right and an obligation to dominate the East; the Orient was racialized, sexualized, feminized and identified with absence to prime it for European penetration and occupation. Even in the nineteenth century, as justifications for colonialism shifted from religious to scientific grounds, scientific racism had justified an imperialist racial superiority complex. Whereas the East (i.e. the Orient) had been positioned as a passive threat in the dominant Western imaginary of the colonial era, the East (i.e. the Soviet Union) was framed as the most active threat to the West in the post-colonial era. As the Cold War materialized, the East and the West came to emblemize two paternal world leaders vying for unipolar hegemony. Unlike past global superpowers, however, these two would have to establish dominance through proxies, forging alliances instead of capturing colonies. The multiplication of sovereign nation-states in post-colonial Africa and Asia called for a new imperial approach: to achieve geopolitical prominence, superpowers would have to rely upon their capacity to persuade Third World leaders to commit to security partnerships. In the Western pole of the new world order, “the Orient” was no longer a suitable frame for conceptualizing “the East” in its entirety. If US executive agents had limited their rhetoric to the tropes of Orientalism, they would have lost the ability to theoretically separate any postcolonies of the Middle East from the Soviet Union. As a result, they would have ceded important and winnable spheres of influence to their enemy. To facilitate participation in the emerging “game of nations” with the USSR, the executive branch moved past the confines of Orientalism by strategically reinventing geographies. In 1944, the State Department established, for the first time, an office of Near Eastern Affairs, broken into three divisions: Near Eastern Affairs, Middle Eastern Affairs, and African Affairs. These designations provided US agents with a more technical or professional lens to manipulate former colonies into submitting to a new imperial order. Colonies graduated to the “Third World,” a new conceptual geography categorized last on a tripartite geopolitical hierarchy and primed for political, economic, and/or military penetration by either the “Second World” of the Soviet Union or the “First World” of Euro-America. US executive agents had another significant reason not to embrace the geographical schema of Orientalism: its complex and maturing relationship with Israel. The US supported the creation of a Jewish state in Israel in 1948, and has since relied upon Israel as an ally which helps protect Western hegemony in the region. As the Jewish population steadily rose in the Middle East following the termination of WWII and the Holocaust, Western discourse ironically pushed Jews further and further from the category “Oriental” and its associated stereotypes. In classical Orientalist thought, Jews and Muslims alike were more closely associated with each other than with Christians, as both were considered Semitic, therefore Asiatic, therefore Oriental. After WWII, Jews were reclassified as “Western” and became more closely associated with Christians, in what Said refers to as the smooth “transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target.” In the post-colonial era, the Arab has been posited antagonistically to the Jew; both an ideological hatred for Jews and a practical disruption of Israeli existence are assumed intrinsic characteristics of Arab-ness. The perceived necessity to identify Israel with the West, despite its physical location in the Middle East, evidences a new significance in the relationship between political identity and conceptions of geography. In the Cold War era, a nation’s designation as Western or Eastern could not so easily be determined by locating its position on a globe; its (geo)political orientation, or identity, became a more significant determinant. “Western” nations embraced liberalism and democracy, and thus belonged on the side of the US and its Western European allies. “Eastern” nations were associated with communism (falsely applied as an umbrella term for all forms of socialism and often other anti-Western ideologies) and identified with the Soviet Union. Imagined as a competition not only between two superpowers, but between two mutually exclusive world orders, the Cold War framework called upon the leaders and allies of the US and the USSR to annihilate the other’s power to fully actualize a unipolar order. As Chapters Two and Three revealed, US executive agents would not accept Cold War neutralism as a position which political leaders could legitimately occupy. Instead, a bifurcated with us or against us logic was applied to diplomacy, sometimes pushing leaders like Nasser and Malcolm X closer to Russia in the process. The Truman Doctrine volunteered US military, diplomatic, and economic support to any free state who would assist in the global struggle against Soviet Communism. But nations or parties who refused the offer were treated with suspicion, political hostility, and sometimes economic and/or military intervention. Early Cold Warriors pictured the globe as divided into the God-worshipping “Free World” of the West versus the atheistic (and materially impoverished) tyranny of Soviet Communism to the East. Leaders of “Third World” post-colonial nations were asked (coerced) to position themselves within this new dualism. US promotion of modernization and “Westernization” in the post-colonies fostered a vision of the West that had the potential to expand into the (former) Orient through acts of political, economic, and cultural penetration. Unlike its European predecessors, the emerging US empire officially championed the Western way of life as one naturally and hypothetically available to all people, from all races and all hemispheres. The rising significance of geopolitical identity marks a definitive shift away from the colonial era, wherein geopolitical domination was justified via the naturalization of global racial hierarchies. Mahmood Mamdani explains that in the colonial era, “laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as a biological necessity.” But as colonies were rapidly graduating to nation-states, imperial leaders were forced to acknowledge postcolonial governments as “independent members of the world.” US executive agents thereby repositioned Third World post-colonies somewhere in between “civilized nation-states” and “lower races,” in the sense that their value was determined by their willingness to align with the US empire and to serve its expanding hegemony. The transition into post-colonialism and the Cold War geopolitical order thus brought with it new conceptualizations of “inside” and “outside” the East and the West. The case of Israeli Jews advancing from the category of Oriental to that of Western, as they migrated from Europe to the Middle East, is evidence of this phenomenon. Chapters Two and Three also demonstrate the fading connection between the geo-spatial location of a nation, and its association with a geographically-centered pole. Chapter Two analyzed the FBI’s rhetorical positioning of the Nation of Islam as an anti-American, anti-Western, and communist (sympathizing) cult. By targeting the NOI as a domestic and international security threat, executive discourse produced an image of “the black Muslims” as outsiders to the Western order emerging from inside the geographical and legal confines of the West. Ignoring the NOI’s decolonial demand for nation-statehood, the FBI rhetorically situated NOI members as traitors, who “disavow their allegiance to the United States and pledge their allegiance only to Allah and do not consider it their duty to… serve in the United States Armed Forces as they cannot serve two masters.”