Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite

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Simon and Schuster, 1995 M07 1 - 368 pages
A tight-knit group closely linked by intermarriage as well as class and old school ties, the “Arabists” were men and women who spent much of their lives living and working in the Arab world as diplomats, military attaches, intelligence agents, scholar-adventurers, and teachers. As such, the Arabists exerted considerable influence both as career diplomats and as bureaucrats within the State Department from the early nineteenth century to the present. But over time, as this work shows, the group increasingly lost touch with a rapidly changing American society, growing both more insular and headstrong and showing a marked tendency to assert the Arab point of view. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and other official and private sources, Kaplan reconstructs the 100-year history of the Arabist elite, demonstrating their profound influence on American attitudes toward the Middle East, and tracing their decline as an influx of ethnic and regional specialists has transformed the State Department and challenged the power of the old elite.
 

Contents

Aggrieved Area Experts
Mugged by Reality
Horan of Arabia
Indiana Jones
Debacle
The Icy Eyes That Had Contemplated Nineveh
Cowering in a Dark Alley
Hostages to Idealism

Reality
Mr Foreign Service
Old Hands
Never a Dull Moment
Redemption
A New Species?
Bibliography
Copyright

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About the author (1995)

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenege of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

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