Michael Doran explores why the US fails to stand by its friends in the Middle East and succumbs to the siren call of traditionally hostile states.
By GLENN C. ALTSCHULERSmoke rises from oil tanks beside the Suez Canal hit during the initial Anglo-French assault on Port Said in November 1956(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Before he took office as secretary of defense in 2013, US Sen. Chuck Hagel distributed three dozen copies of a study praising president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s management of the Suez crisis to members of the Obama administration – including the president, secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and secretary of defense Leon Panetta. The lessons, Hagel implied, were clear: military intervention does not work and the United States should be prepared, when such action is in our national interest, to stand up to Israel and its American supporters.Michael Doran – a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush – believes that the study, and Hagel, “got it entirely wrong.” In Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise To Dominance In The Middle East, Doran maintains that Eisenhower’s policies in the Middle East were deeply flawed.Predicated on a desire to co-opt Arab nationalists (especially Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt), he argues, the “honest broker” strategy resulted in the withdrawal of Britain from its bases; the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company; the suspension of hostilities against Egypt when Britain, France and Israel were on the brink of success; the creation of the United Arab Republic; the overthrow of the government of Iraq; and a perception in the region that America was at odds with Arab popular will.Ike’s Gamble advances the controversial thesis that Eisenhower should have slowed or halted British withdrawal from the Canal Zone; supported military action by Israel against the Fedayeen; and allowed British, French and Israeli soldiers to stay put in the Suez in 1956 until they had extracted concessions from Nasser, “such as verifiable force limitations in the Sinai and international oversight of the Suez Canal.”The lessons Doran draws from US policies in the Middle East in the 1950s are also provocative. The application of force, he declares, can serve political goals. Israel is an asset, not a liability, to the United States as it engages the central strategic challenges in the region. And, Doran suggests, US presidents should not be fooled into exaggerating the “broader significance” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is truly pressing “only in its neighborhood”; and should pay much closer attention to inter-Arab politics.Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, Ike’s Gamble takes us inside the foreign policy establishment in the United States – and reminds us of the nature and depth of anti-Israeli sentiment among officials of the State Department.“Almost all Americans with diplomatic, educational, missionary or business experience in the Middle East,” one of them wrote, “protest fervently that support of political Zionism is directly contrary to our national interests, as well as to common justice.” Former secretary of state John Foster Dulles agreed that “we are in the present jam” because in acquiescing to the wishes of American Zionists, president Harry Truman “had created a basic antagonism with the Arabs” on which the Soviets were capitalizing.In other respects, however, Doran’s account is marred by a tendency to hyperbole.Although he acknowledges that American policy in the Middle East “can exacerbate or ameliorate the major conflicts, but it can rarely solve them,” and agrees that Eisenhower was a “stone cold realist,” Doran often overstates the capacity of the US to control events. He exaggerates the degree to which the president “turned a blind eye” to Nasser’s “revolutionary incitement”; believed that this “born manipulator” was likely to become a cooperative partner; invited Nasser, albeit unwittingly, to take over the Suez Canal; and played the crucial role in making him “the undisputed leader” of the Arab world.Although the evidence is not conclusive, Doran believes that Eisenhower came to regret his decision to force an unconditional withdrawal of British, French and Israeli forces from the Suez. It is true, however, that after the crisis, the American government approved the sale of antitank rifles and Sikorsky helicopters to Israel, “a minor factor in the overall military balance,” Doran writes, “but a major change – a revolution, no less” – in strategic thinking.Doran suggests as well that “while standing behind Eisenhower as he underwent a paradigm shift,” president Richard Nixon learned that the United States should be an interested mediator rather than an honest-broker in the Middle East, among other reasons, because military power can augment America’s influence and power – and did not force Israel to withdraw following the 1973 war until Egypt signed binding agreements.Doran claims that Eisenhower’s lesson – the honest broker approach of “sidelining the Israelis and the Europeans simply did not produce the promised results” – is as timely as it is consequential. Indeed, he may have written Ike’s Gamble, in part, as a shot across the bow of the Obama administration, which he implies, has responded to the wild crosscurrents in the Middle East by failing to stand by its friends and succumbing to the siren call of traditionally hostile states.The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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