Stephen Hubbell

In the following viewpoint, Stephen Hubbell contends that the goal of U.S. intervention in the Middle East is to maintain oil prices at a rate favorable to American interests and to preserve an allegedly strategic alliance with Israeli elites. The United States claims to be concerned with suppressing terrorism, abuses of human rights, and the development of weapons of mass destruction. In actuality, Hubbell argues, the United States favors those nations that advance American strategic and economic objectives regardless of their record on human rights or weapons proliferation. Nations that harbor dissent with U.S. policy face damaging economic sanctions, political isolation, and military intervention, he maintains. Hubbell is an editor of Middle East Report, a monthly periodical.

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