Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq

The book "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy" explores the origins and history of US intervention in Iraq, revealing the paranoia that drove Cold War-era policy makers and the impact of these policies on the region.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 336 pages
\n Publication date: 01 June 2021
\n Publisher: Stanford University Press
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Iraq has been the focal point of some of the United States' longest and most persistent military operations since the Vietnam War. However, the reasons for US engagement in the country are still very much hidden, buried beneath clichés about promoting democracy or ambiguous notions of American national interests. With this book, Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt uncovers the roots and rich history of US involvement in Iraq.

The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy weaves together the histories of Arab nationalists, US diplomats, and Western oil executives to tell the parallel stories of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the resilience of Iraqi society. Drawing on new evidence—the private records of the IPC, interviews with key figures in Arab oil politics, and recently declassified US government documents—Wolfe-Hunnicutt covers the arc of the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI origins of the IPC consortium and the decline of the British Empire, to the beginnings of covert US action in the region, and ultimately the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry and the perils of postcolonial politics.

American policymakers of the Cold War era inherited the imperial anxieties of their British forebears and inflated concerns about access to and potential scarcity of oil, giving rise to a paranoid style in US foreign policy. Wolfe-Hunnicutt deconstructs these policy practices to reveal how they fueled decades of American interventions in the region and shines a light on those places that America's covert empire builders might prefer we not look.

\n Weight: 520g\n
Dimension: 152 x 230 x 30 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781503627918\n \n