Globalization connotes the removal of barriers between states to the movement of capital, goods and labor. While the lowering of barriers to the movement of factors of production has resulted in transnational networks of production and elements of an international civil society, it has also facilitated international terrorist networks, drug cartels and the like. In the Middle East, for strategic reasons discussed in this paper, the spectrum of barriers to be removed includes not just protectionist trade or monetary policies but the regimes as well. ‘Regime change’ can be brutal or gradual, imposed or developed from within. This paper examines the sorts of political change envisaged by the authors of the Arab Human Development Report 2002 to overcome the region’s ‘freedom deficit’ as well as the darker, by now all too familiar, scenarios associating this dimension of globalization— regime change—with American (multilateral or unilateral) military operations. The Middle East is home to most of the oil that fueled the world’s first truly global industry, but the region may also become the epicenter of forces that reverse the globalizing tendencies of states.