Conclusion
   
As the 1920s drew to a close, both the British and the Americans could view developments in the Middle East with deep satisfaction. Through a combination of force and guile, Great Britain had fashioned order out of chaos. Her foes she had vanquished or appeased. Turkey had been reintegrated into the British-led world order. In Iraq, where a political void had existed, an increasingly self-sufficient client state now stood through which Britain could exert supreme direction of Iraqi affairs without the costs and risks of colonial empire. Her strategic interests, arising from the exigencies of Indian defense, had been secured. The world's foremost imperial power had adjusted so well to the realities of a new era that the results would endure for nearly three decades.

    The British triumph was an American triumph as well. To realize its expansionist ambitions the United States required stability abroad. Between nations, she wanted peace; within them, she wanted tranquil conditions, congenial to investment and trade. Thus, in bringing order to an unruly region the British had served American interests in addition to their own. In Washington this was well understood; not once during Britain's years of tribulation did U.S. policymakers even think of exploiting her difficulties to any narrow ends. Those forces antagonistic to Britain's design-anarchic tribal factions on the one hand, and radical nationalist movements on the other-menaced the welfare of every advanced industrial state. If they got out of hand, vast regions would remain effectively closed to development by any country-or so the statesmen of capitalist powers believed. Therefore, in the minds of American open

door expansionists, the most formidable enemy in the underdeveloped world was not the traditional imperialism of the European states, whose discriminatory actions might impede the circulation of American money and goods, but instead, all movements -organized or spontaneous, nationalist or anarchic -that bred turmoil, infringed on foreign property rights, and created generally unsafe milieus wherein to live and work.

    When these movements had been tamed at last-through the Cairo program, as applied to Iraq, and through British diplomacy during and after Lausanne, culminating in a revived Anglo-Turkish entente-officials in Washington saw their basic hopes fulfilled. The fact that Britain had fulfilled them, and that the United States had declined to contribute more substantively to the common cause, only increased U.S. satisfaction with the outcome. By moving in the slipstream of British power, the United States had got what it wanted, enjoying the fruits of imperial power while avoiding the expense. The strategy of an open door had been vindicated.

    For Britain, however, America's failure to share in the work of controlling the Middle East had been acutely frustrating. Whitehall had hoped to convert the essential congruity of British and U.S. interests into a set of obligations to which the United States would adhere. In the end, Great Britain had to settle for much less: a certain informal American helpfulness that never encompassed any commitment of material resources; government- sponsored cooperation among private corporations; U.S. expressions of amity and goodwill. Only with the coming of World War 11 would the United States decisively turn from its policy of nonentanglement. But by then the British Empire was already doomed as a world system. No longer could Americans depend upon British armed force to provide a safe escort through hazardous regions. The United States would have to assume the imperial burdens herself, and the golden era of the open door would come to an end.
    

Stivers, William, Supremacy and oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American world order, 1918-1930, Ithaca: Cornell university press, 1982, S. 192 f.