Should the middle east be capitalized?

It depends on what you mean by "capitalized".

If you are referring to the use of majuscule or upper-case letters, YES. The "Middle East" as a region is a proper noun and should always be capitalized.

If you are referring to the injection of money or capital into a region, it depends. There are a number of areas of the Middle East, especially in the Persian Gulf Region, where the export of petroleum has provided the funds to capitalize other areas of the economy and countries like the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have invested those petroleum funds in other areas of the economy. While they do not need capitalization, their nascent diversification could benefit from it. There are a number of countries like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya which are in the middle of civil war (as of April 2016) and have no economy to capitalize. Finally, there are a number of countries like Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Tunisia which have functioning economies and no endemic source of investment. These countries are worth injecting capital into in order to both promote technological and industrial development and to promote stability in the region.