The early Cold War period might be called the Age of the Treaty Organization. The United States, scrambling furiously to respond to the fact that it had become the guarantor of the “Free World,” had discovered a surprising interest in entangling alliances of all sorts and in all parts of the world. NATO, of course, was the biggest pact of them all, but in 1954 the “Manilla Pact” created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, SEATO, and the next year the “Baghdad Pact” gave birth to the Central Treaty Organization, CENTO, in the Middle East. In addition, bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea and Thailand helped weave together a set of global alliances. Harry Truman’s containment policy pushed the United States to out-pact the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact.

All of these deals were historical anomalies, to put it mildly; creatures of the unique time. CENTO, in particular, was a horse designed by a committee: It included Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Great Britain. But not the United States; as John Foster Dulles complained, it fell victim to “the pro-Israel lobby and the difficulty of obtaining congressional approval.” The organization was thus a flop from the start, doing little to contribute to containment of the Soviets or to regional stability: CENTO failed rapidly and often. A military coup in Baghdad (ousting the king of Iraq and making the Ba’ath Party the dominant political force in the country) took Iraq out of CENTO and CENTO out of Baghdad. The alliance lurched on in Ankara until the 1979 Iran revolution.