The knowledge that accumulated between 1981 and 2001 never intersected the world of policy because it was never integrated into an overall vision of Middle Eastern/Islamic politics of sufficient persuasiveness to unseat the long-standing assumptions that had guided most policy decisions since World War II. It has long been a commonplace that U.S. policies over that period reflected a calculation of national interest that had three components: security for the state of Israel, maintenance of a steady flow of petroleum at reasonable prices, and denial of opportunities for the Soviet Union to secure footholds in the region. In addition, several theoretical assumptions derived from modernization theory channeled the ways in which policy makers sought to ensure these national interests: 1) In the process of modernization, economic development normally precedes democratization, which can go awry if it is not based on mass education, and a solid and prosperous middle class. 2) The process of modernization is necessarily accompanied by a growth of secularism and a retreat of religion from the public stage to the arena of private observance. 3) Strong guidance"preferably by academy-trained military officers, western-educated technocrats, or monarchs willing to collaborate with western powers"is needed to channel resources efficiently and rein in immature or demagogic advocates of democratization.
These several assumptions, which were well articulated by the scholars who laid the theoretical foundation for the field of Middle East studies in the late 1950s, resulted in a fairly consistent and bipartisan policy outlook for half a century. Moreover, they seemed to work. Instability in the early postwar decades gave way in the 1970s to authoritarian regimes, some military and some monarchical, that sought to develop their economies, educate their young people along modern and often secular lines, and exclude from the political arena anyone who advocated placing communism or Islam at the center of political life. The United States agonized over Israel’s unexpected vulnerability in the Ramadan war of 1973, suffered through the oil crisis that came out of the war, and worried continuously about Soviet expansion. Islamic politics, however, never reached the threshold of visibility on the worry list, despite the fact that the writings of Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini, and many others were achieving broad circulation and stimulating their readers to dream about different social and political orders.