Quote Originally Posted by KingJaja View Post
...The great problem of the Cold War is this - it presented Washington with a binary world.
...yet the core of the problem is that this was never the case. Yes, it 'simplified things' to call people like Nasser or Assad 'Soviet puppets', but that never made such statements truth. Indeed, especially because of people like Nasser and Assad, plus quite a few others, if there was ever an area where the Cold War was anything but bi-polar, then it was the Middle East.

Eisenhower administration understood this very well and run appropriate - and even-handed - policies. To a certain degree, even that of Kennedy did. The 'change' came with Johnson and especially Nixon. It's since that time, that the USA began considering the situation in the Middle East through the prism of Cold War, i.e. as bi-polar. But, that was a result of Johnson and then Nixon introducing the practice of abandoning genuine US interests and replacing these with those of Israel (meanwhile this is reaching proportions where one could save billions by disbanding the State Department and letting Tel Aviv do what it is de-facto doing ever since, i.e. run the US foreign policy).

So Washington was spared the inconvenience of deeply questioning the foundations of the post-colonial order established by UK and France.
Nope. Johnson (and then Nixon) introduced the practice of explaining the Middle East through the prism of Cold War in attempt to offer an excuse for abandoning US, British, and French security guarantees for territorial integrity of all the countries in the Middle East and openly siding with Israel.

Simplified (yet specific): they needed an excuse for taking sides and escalating the Arab-Israeli conflict through deliveries of hundreds of F-4s and A-4to Israel when these were entirely unnecessary, and do so in face of fierce opposition from the State Dept. and (particularly) the Pentagon. Declaring Arabs for 'Soviet clients' was the simpliest solution for this, and then one 'everybody understood'.

Britain and France will try to goad US to protect their spheres of influence in Africa, but will US see clearly enough to understand the complexities - or will they seek the easy way out - sticking with their "allies"?
The UK is well beyond the point where it can dream about protecting its spheres of influence anywhere. On the contrary, the French are doing quite well (read: usually far better than the USA) in protecting their interests in Africa.

The latter means not that these policies are the best for all the locals, of course.

With a handful of exceptions, the USA is so far doing only one mistake after the other, and getting involved in ever more affairs that make absolutely no sense - except for opening specific (dubious) sources to certain diamond handlers and (to a lesser degree) to the mining/oil sector.