title: Greater Middle East
text: The Greater Middle East is a political term introduced in March 2004 in a paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the Group of Eight summit of June 2004. The area denotes a vaguely defined region called the "Arab world" together with Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and several other neighboring countries that have cultural or religious ties. The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa. 
  
  Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute defined the Greater Middle East as the MENA region together with the Caucasus and Central Asia. Other sources have named this world region as the "Middle East Crescent" (which includes the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasian and Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union), since this area resembles a crescent straddling in the middle of Europe, Africa, and Asia.
  
  The future of the Greater Middle East has sometimes been referred to as the "new Middle East", first so by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who presented the second-term Bush administration's vision for the region's future in June 2006 in Dubai. Rice said would be achieved through "constructive chaos", a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War had broken out; the meaning of this phrase and the Bush administration's vision have been much debated since. The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".
  
  Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that a "political awakening" is taking place in this region which may be an indicator of the multipolar world that is now developing. He alluded to the Greater Middle East as the "Global Balkans", and as a control lever on an area he refers to as Eurasia. According to Andrew Bacevich's book America's War for the Greater Middle East (2016), this region is the theater for a series of conflicts dating back to 1980, which heralded the start of the Iran–Iraq War. Since then, the U.S. has been involved in balancing conflicts amongst these culturally interconnected nations in order to further its interests in the region.
  
  See also
   Arab world
   Demographics of the Middle East and North Africa
   Great Game
   Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
   Muslim world
   Project for the New American Century 
   Sykes–Picot Agreement
   The Grand Chessboard
  
  References
  
  External links
  
   "Greater Middle East: The US plan"
   "The Greater Middle East Initiative: Sea Island and Beyond (U.S. Senate)"
   "Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look"
   A legacy of U.S. military failure in the Middle East over the past three decades"
  
  2004 neologisms
  Political theories
  Middle East
  Geographical neologisms
  Geography of the Middle East