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Avid readers are well aware that the Middle East section of any major bookstore is packed with a broad array of volumes on the subject. But Patrick Tyler's time spent browsing the Middle East book shelves always left him with the same disappointment: The book he wanted to read about the region simply wasn't there.

So he wrote it.

Tyler, a New York Times chief correspondent, this year published "A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East -- from the Cold War to the War on Terror," chronicling American policy in the Middle East from the vantage point of each presidential administration since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"It's an educational impulse -- the book that I wanted to read when I went out to the Middle East was not on the shelf," Tyler told The Jewish State in a phone interview. "And the Middle East is this very unwieldy geographic and political landscape, and so it's very hard to organize a useful history of the region."

Because of that, Tyler chose to use presidential administrations as the organizing principle for a history of the region going back to the 1950s. One of the features of that history, he found, was a profound discontinuity that has led to a zigzagging of policy pronouncements instead of a straight line.

"Some of these observations are self-evident," Tyler said. "Each president seeks to distinguish himself from his predecessor. Well, a policy area like the Middle East is not as overarching as, say, the Cold War policy imperative, that held many administrations together in kind of a seamless web of continuity facing the Soviet threat. None of that continuity was extant in the Middle East, and so a president could distinguish himself from his predecessor by simply shifting horses."

Priorities in the region, then, were different for successive administrations. Was oil more important than Israel? Was the security of the Persian Gulf more important than that of North Africa? The answers to such questions could and would change with new presidents.

Tyler said his research shows that America's domestic political context makes it "difficult for a coherent and long-running foreign policy, which can be easily undermined by the normal political currents and changes from one election to the next."

Critics have said Tyler's book contains no heroes, because of all the Mideast failures of the various administrations. But Tyler said the book isn't intended to trash the policies or the men behind them.

"What I was struck by was how hard most of them tried to understand the region and to make a useful contribution to peace, and how easily they were all diverted," Tyler said. "And I think you have to understand that. And it's not about heroes, it's about 'history is truth,' and truth is ugly."

Inherent in the episodes of each president's Mideast policies was the reality of political contradictions, such as Lindon Johnson's emotional attachment to Israel but utilitarian outlook on making policy.

"I think it is clear that Lindon Johnson had a moral attachment to the Zionist cause, to the Zionist enterprise, to the extent that he understood it, and I don't think he had a complex understanding of it," Tyler said.

Yet, outside of his romantic view of Zionism, Johnson viewed politics as the practice of leverage, he said.

"So notwithstanding those moral connections, there were many days when Linden Johnson got up and said, 'If they want that, I need this' -- that was politics for him," Tyler said.

But communication can be even more important than principle when dealing with such a volatile region, and Tyler recounts in the book how Nixon blundered in his messaging even before he took office.

Nixon sent former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton to the Middle East, and while there Scranton made a comment about the U.S. taking a more "evenhanded" approach to the region -- usually interpreted as the U.S. moving away from Israel and closer to the Arabs. The outcry convinced Nixon to drop Scranton.

When asked whether that was an indication that currently more such talk is tolerated than it was in Nixon's time, Tyler said that much has changed in the region since Nixon's presidency, though he does imagine that President Barack Obama's envoy, George Mitchell, still has to speak diplomatically and stay away from expressing sentiments that would alienate either constituency.

"But I think one thing that's different about the beginning of this Obama period, is that the so-called monolithic Israeli lobby is no longer monolithic," Tyler said, noting that pro-Israel groups are not single-issue proponents because of the complex reality of the issues at hand.

Another difference, Tyler offered, is the mandate with which each president has come into office.

"Obama comes into office, I think, with a much stronger mandate for diplomatic undertakings in the world than Richard Nixon did," he said. "Richard Nixon came into office knowing that if he didn't get us out of Vietnam he wouldn't have a second term. So the Middle East was a much more neuralgic place for him."

Tyler said he was surprised by how much he learned while researching for the book.

"It was a great education," he said. "I've been a Middle East correspondent and I thought I knew a lot about the region, and it was very humbling to get into presidential archives and realize that the complicated matrix of decision-making within each administration, the connection to domestic politics, the interventions of powerful personalities like Kissinger and Brzezinski, make it such a complex and nuanced and detailed history that you find it full of surprises."

Additionally, Tyler's research made him so interested in Zionism and Israeli culture that his next book will be a political biography of the security establishment in Israel.

Tyler said that if you look at all the revolutions over the past two centuries -- the Bolsheviks in Russia, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba -- "the one that succeeded, that built a big powerful country that is a huge success -- I mean there are controversial aspects to its history and to its collision with the Palestinians, but the one that succeeded is Israel: the Zionist revolution. And the group of characters that are at the heart of that narrative -- Ben-Gurion and Dayan, and Sharon, Rabin, etc., we all know their names -- as a collective biography, became fascinating to me."

That book is due out in 2011. "A World of Trouble" is available now from Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and all major booksellers.