On role in general, and the US role in particular, the following are helpful: HolstiK J, (1983), International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall); HolstiK J, (1970), ‘National Role Conceptions in the Study of Foreign Policy’, International Studies Quarterly14(3); HoffmannS, (1968), Gulliver's Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy (New York, McGraw-Hill); HoffmannS, (1978), Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy Since the Cold War (New York, McGraw-Hill). The problem of America's role in the 1980s is touched on in (for example): TuckerR, (1981), The Purposes of American Power: An Essay on National Security (New York, Praeger); OyeKRothchildRLieberR, (eds) (1979), Eagle Entangled: US Foreign Policy in a Complex World (New York, Longman); OyeKRothchildRLieberR, (eds) (1983), Eagle Defiant: US Foreign Policy in the 1980s (Boston, Little Brown). On the US role in the Middle East, see the following extended treatments: TillmanS P, (1982), The US in the Middle East: Interests and Obstacles (Indiana University Press); Quandt, W B (1977), Decade of Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1967–1976 (University of California Press); and SpiegelS L, (1985), The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago University Press). Some of the most authoritative commentaries on US policies are to be found in Foreign Affairs, especially in its annual review of America and the World, which always contains analysis of Middle East issues and also a detailed chronology for the year in question.
