The American Awakening In the Middle East

The Middle East of the 1950s presented unique challenges to the Eisenhower presidency. The winds of change were sweeping through the region, leading Egypt’s Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers to cast aside Egypt’s corrupt monarchy in the name of Arab nationalism. In the meantime, an exhausted British Empire was looking for ways of sustaining its presence while a nascent Israeli state was struggling to build a democratic society in the face of Arab hostility. In the midst of all this, an America fixated on the Cold War was trying to stabilize a region whose oil and strategic location were suddenly critical for containment of the Soviet Union.

This is a story that has been told many times, but seldom with the depth and stylistic elegance of Ike’s Gamble. Michael Doran does not just challenge the prevailing historiography, he turns it on its head. This is not a book of conjecture but an argument rooted in archival evidence and told in its many dimensions. It has long been the conceit of historians that the failure of Eisenhower to forge a constructive relationship with Nasser had to do with his insistence on imposing American mandates on a nationalist who merely sought exemption from the Cold War power blocs. America’s friends, the argument goes, did not help: Israeli aggression and Britain’s imperial greed only aggravated America’s ham-fisted diplomacy.

Doran’s account unfolds in two distinct timelines. When Eisenhower first assumed power in 1953, he appreciated the arrival of postcolonial nationalism as an important factor in shaping the politics of the developing world. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s cagey successor, had already pronounced that Cold War competition was to play itself out in the regions undergoing a transition from colonial rule to self-determination. Nasser appeared dynamic and in command of a state that was still the epicenter of Arab politics. The signal coming out of Cairo was that, for the right price, Nasser was willing to enable America’s Cold War. It was a signal transmitted through the gullible Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA and an even more naïve ambassador in Cairo, Henry Byroade. And it was a signal that found a receptive audience in a State Department still plagued with antisemitism.

An experienced and wise leader, Eisenhower should have known better. Doran demonstrates that, all along, Nasser was pursuing his own agenda of imperial aggrandizement that necessitated the eviction of Britain from the Middle East, the replacement of conservative Arab monarchies with his clones, and assaulting Israel. And in the process, Nasser had no problem dealing with the Kremlin, purchasing its arms, and offering it a toehold in the Middle East.

To achieve American cooperation, Nasser dangled the possibility of making peace with Israel, which a parade of American officials (then as now) falsely believed to be the key to steadying the region. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles played their part: They pressured Britain to give up its military base in the Suez Canal zone, they refused to sell arms to Israel, and they limited their own alliance network in the region to propitiate Nasser.

In the end, however, Nasser was playing a short game. His lies finally caught up with him when he rebuffed Eisenhower’s trusted adviser Robert B. Anderson, who had journeyed to Cairo in early 1956 hoping to enlist Nasser in a land-for-peace scheme with Israel. To his credit, Eisenhower’s pursuit of engagement lasted less than two years: By the spring of 1956 he was considering ways of deflating Nasser’s ambitions (if not undermining his rule) through something called the Omega Plan. Omega called for ending assistance to Egypt, building up its regional rivals, and gradually pressuring Nasser either to change his ways or suffer the consequences of his defiance. It was this plan that Great Britain, France, and Israel disrupted by invading Suez.

One of the strengths of Ike’s Gamble is its use of multinational archives to shed light on the deliberations of all the actors involved. The secret conclaves among Israeli, British, and French officials—scheming behind Eisenhower’s back as they plotted the Suez invasion—read like a John le Carré novel. The fact that the attack on Suez coincided with the Soviet invasion of Hungary helped Russia and its Western propagandists advance the false narrative of moral equivalence between the two blocs. An irate Eisenhower may have curtailed the invasion by threatening sanctions on his allies, but he knew that he had to reckon with the problem of Nasser. The central lesson of the Suez War is that junior partners should never blindside their superpower benefactor.

The year 1958 proved the apex of Nasserism. Egypt and Syria united to the cheers of a frenzied Arab public. In Iraq, a conservative monarchy was decapitated while Nasserism threatened both Jordan and Lebanon. But as Doran shows us, the conservative order held with no small measure of help from a repentant Eisenhower. Washington took steps to buttress its allies, including the dispatch of 14,000 troops to Lebanon. The previous hesitation to embrace Israel disappeared as Eisenhower belatedly appreciated that the Jewish state was one of America’s most reliable strategic partners in the Middle East. Even Britain’s fortunes revived as it had a role in steadying Jordan through the deployment of paratroopers. In the meantime, Nasser found himself in the midst of bickering Syrians and assailed from the left by the radicals who took over Iraq.

Doran’s retelling of this history aims to be instructive. Barack Obama also ventured into the Middle East believing that, if he only distanced himself from America’s allies and cozied up to adversaries, he could stabilize the region on the cheap. In the process, he denigrated our Arab allies, strained America’s traditional bonds with Israel, and signed a catastrophic arms-control agreement with Iran. To their credit, the guardians of the Islamic Republic, as recipients of unusual American deference, never bothered lying to Obama’s emissaries the way Nasser did to Eisenhower’s representatives. They were honest about their enmity toward the United States and brazen in their projections of power. For good measure, they even taunted the American armada in the Persian Gulf that the White House had ordered to stand down.

The tragedy of the Obama years has been that his presidency never went through a course correction, as Eisenhower’s did. As a result, America’s friends are suffering.

Ray Takeyh, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is coauthor of The Pragmatic Superpower: Winning the Cold War in the

Middle East.