Truman and Eisenhower had intervened in the Far East because of a direct communist threat. But as the American love affair with cars turned into an obsession, United States policymakers became increasingly attentive to the Middle East, where seas of oil had been recently discovered. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia sat upon nearly 60 percent of the world’s known reserves.
After World War II, Zionists, who had long sought to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, intensified their efforts. The slaughter of six million European Jews by the Nazis strengthened Jewish claims to a homeland and intensified pressure to allow hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to immigrate to Palestine, which was governed by Great Britain according to a League of Nations mandate. But the influx of Jewish settlers, and their calls for creation of a Jewish state (Israel), provoked Palestinian and Arab leaders. Fighting broke out. President Truman angered Arab leaders by endorsing the partition of the region into an Israeli and a Palestinian state. In 1947, the United Nations voted for partition and on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was established. Within hours, Truman recognized its sovereignty.
Then Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon attacked Israel. Although badly outnumbered, the Israelis were better organized and better armed than the Arabs and drove them off with relative ease. Nearly a million local Arabs were displaced, causing a desperate refugee problem in nearby countries.
President Truman had consistently placed support for Israel before other considerations in the Middle East, partly because of the conviction that survivors of the Nazi holocaust were entitled to a country of their own and partly because of the political importance of the Jewish vote in the United States. Dulles and Eisenhower tried to restore balance and mollify the Arabs by deemphasizing American support of Israel. Gas-hungry Americans could ill afford to alienate the Arab world.
In 1952 a revolution in Egypt overthrew the dissolute King Farouk. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the strongman of Egypt. The United States was prepared to lend Nasser money to build a huge dam on the Nile at Aswan that would provide irrigation and electric power for much of the region. However, Eisenhower would not sell Egypt arms, but the communists would.
For this reason Nasser drifted toward the communist orbit. When Eisenhower then decided not to finance the Aswan Dam, Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal. This move galvanized the British and French. In conjunction with the French, and without consulting the United States, the British in 1956 decided to take back the canal by force. The Israelis, alarmed by repeated Arab hit-and-run raids, also attacked Egypt.
Events moved swiftly. Israeli armored columns crushed the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula in a matter of days. France and Britain occupied Port Said at the northern end of the canal. Nasser sank ships to block the channel. In the UN the Soviet Union and the United States introduced resolutions calling for a cease-fire. Both were vetoed by Britain and France.
Then the Soviet Union threatened to send “volunteers” to help defend Egypt and launch atomic missiles against France and Great Britain if they did not withdraw. Eisenhower also demanded that the invaders pull out of Egypt. In London large crowds demonstrated against their own government. On November 6, only nine days after the first Israeli units had invaded Egypt, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, haggard and shaken, announced a cease-fire. Israel withdrew its troops. The crisis subsided as rapidly as it had arisen.
The United States had won a measure of respect in the Arab countries, but at what cost? Its major allies had been humiliated. Their ill-timed attack had enabled the Soviet Union to recover much of the prestige it had lost as a result of its brutal suppression of a Hungarian revolt that had broken out a week before the Suez fiasco.
When the Soviet Union seemed likely to profit from its “defense” of Egypt in the crisis, the president announced the Eisenhower Doctrine (January 1957), which stated that the United States was “prepared to use armed force” anywhere in the Middle East against “aggression from any country controlled by international communism.” In practice, the Eisenhower Doctrine amounted to little more than a restatement of the containment policy.
World History
