The U.S. Approaches to Political Islam in the First Half of the 1990s: Theory and Practice
This paper examines the U.S. approaches to political Islam in the first half of the 1990s. It was the first time when Islamism rose to the forefront of the U.S. policy agenda in the Middle East and North Africa and started being regarded as a distinctive international problem. The U.S. expert community and foreign policy agencies came up with the idea of conducting dialogue with moderate Islamists – the idea, which later became the basis of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy after the ‘Arab Spring’. The paper analyses the debates on political Islam in the U.S. political and academic circles and George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton administrations’ approaches to this phenomenon. It also sheds the light on the practical implementation of those approaches in several key countries in the region, such as Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.