The Middle East has long been regarded as the most heavily penetrated regional system anywhere in the world. The geographic hub linking Africa, Asia, and Europe together, and the location of vast hydrocarbon reserves on which the world economy has come to depend for the last eight decades, the interest that great powers have had in either influencing, or, in some cases, controlling the region has been self-evident.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, this control was largely seen through the ideological conflict that was the Cold War. Emerging regional alliances determined, for the most part, a bifurcation of allegiances across the Arab world between Republican and largely dynastic regimes. In turn, Washington and Moscow looked to leverage geo-strategic advantage but without unnecessarily exacerbating indigenous frictions that could quickly escalate into a wider conflagration. Our understanding of such competition was guided by an almost received understanding of ‘Grand Strategy’, a term first coined in the 1930s by the British strategist, Basil Liddell Hart, to describe how the resources of what he termed the ‘nation’ or indeed ‘band of nations’ (‘alliances’) are directed towards the attaining political victory through war.

This definition, of course is rather styptic. It has a use in studying elite policy formation in times of war, but it remains, as Hal Brands notes, limited in exploring how the actual resources of the state – political, military, economic, psychological, moral and cultural – are organised and used beyond the cockpit of interstate violence. Indeed, how Grand Strategy should be conceived of in periods of peace, not least because decision-making priorities take on an entirely different emphasis, remained an obvious weakness in Liddell-Hart's original construct Moreover, there is an inherent assumption that Grand Strategy represents a conscious endeavour of a coherent decision-making process. More recent scholarship has, however, cast doubt upon this. For example, in trying to explain what he regards as the continuity and stability that has marked American Grand Strategy, Patrick Porter goes beyond the global power exercised by the United States since the end of the Second World War.