Ike vs. Obama in the Middle East

When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president of the United States in 1953, Great Britain was facing a crisis in the Arab Middle East. Although it had formally given up much of its empire (as well as its mandate in Palestine), Britain still exercised a great deal of influence through outright protectorates like the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, friendly monarchies like Jordan and Iraq, and a network of military bases. But the linchpin of the system was Egypt, where the United Kingdom had 80,000 troops stationed along the Suez Canal—and Egypt was in danger. King Faruq, the obliging ruler over a British protectorate, had recently been overthrown, and the nationalist military men who had seized power, known as the Free Officers, were publicly demanding that London evacuate its forces from the country.

What stance would the new American president adopt toward the crisis in Egypt and toward the rest of the Middle East? In general, Eisenhower believed that America’s task was to be an honest broker between the British and the new Arab nationalists seeking redress from their former overlords. In no way idiosyncratic, Ike’s view of the American role in the region was by far the dominant perspective in Washington—a perspective reinforced by the foreign-policy elite’s stance toward Israel, which at best could be described as arm’s-length when not positively adverse.

Indeed, the two postures went together. Like Britain, Israel was a country inextricably linked to the United States but regarded by the Arabs with deep hostility. Since the goal of American policy was to acquire as much Arab goodwill as possible by demonstrating, in the terminology of the administration, “impartiality,” it was necessary to avoid any stigma of association with the Jewish state. This chilly attitude expressed itself, among other ways, in the flowering under the Eisenhower administration of the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a CIA front organization one of whose aims was to counteract the support for Zionism in domestic American politics.