The primary concern of U.S. policy in the Near East during the Cold War was the potential Soviet threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Soviet Union's southern neighbors, and hence to Western interests in the region. Although the U.S. role in the post-World War II Near East was unprecedented, the geopolitical factors involved were not. Since the nineteenth century, a rivalry between the expanding Russian and British empires had been played out in an arena that stretched from the Balkans to British India. The competition for influence in the buffer states between their empires was subsumed under various geographical focuses: the “Balkan Problem,” the “Eastern Question,” the “Persian Problem,” and the “Great Game.” In these regions the Great Powers attempted to carve out their respective spheres of influence. In order to survive, meanwhile, the so-called buffer states allied among themselves against threats from without, played one power off against the other, or looked to third powers, such as Germany, for assistance. After World War II, survival of the buffer states was threatened by the relative disparity between Soviet and British power and by the Soviet Union's policies toward its southern neighbors. Because Germany had been crushed, Iran and Turkey turned to the United States for assistance, and the United States responded.

In subsequent years, the United States attempted to replace a decreasing British presence with a series of commitments—articulated in presidential pronouncements, or“doctrines”—to the re-gion's defense against threats, both real and perceived, from the Soviet Union.