Truth be told, American influence in the Middle East peaked in 1956, when President Eisenhower ordered Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone. However, having thus generated a reservoir of goodwill in the Arab Middle East, the White House later squandered it by halting U.S. aide for the Aswan Dam project as punishment for Nasser's Arab nationalist movement. American influence in the Middle East has been waning ever since, though it spiked briefly in 1991, when then-President George H.W. Bush leveraged the successful ousting of Iraqi troops from Kuwait into a three-day Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid.
Bob C