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.[8][9][10] The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".[11][12]
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.[13][page needed] 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.[citation needed]