Mick Hartley

I've posted about this before – Ike's Gamble: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East - when Adam Kirsch reviewed it back in October. The book, by historian Mike Doran, suggests that, contrary to received opinion, Eisenhower blundered badly in the Suez Crisis, suckered by Nasser into damaging American interests and betraying his real allies.

It's worth revisiting now, with Michael Totten's review in the Tower:

The Israelis will tell you that the first rule of diplomacy in the Middle East is “don’t be a sucker.” Eisenhower allowed himself to be suckered. He wasn’t suckered because he was stupid. He simply believed a few things about the Middle East that seemed true but weren’t.

Those things were these: that Egypt, as the most powerful Arab country, could deliver the entire Arab world to the Americans in the Cold War; that the major obstacles were European colonialism and Zionism; and that the West needed to woo pan-Arab nationalists like Nasser because they would eventually lead the whole region. These ideas were wrong, but they were not controversial. On the contrary, they were conventional wisdom in Washington at the time, and they comported nicely with Eisenhower’s brand of Republican anti-imperialism. “It is impossible,” Doran writes, “to exaggerate the impact that the image of America as an honest broker had on Eisenhower’s thought. Words like idea, concept, and strategy mischaracterize the nature of the vision. Terms like paradigm, worldview, or belief system are more apt.”

Eisenhower, Dulles, and just about everyone else in Washington therefore believed that resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and winding down European colonialism mattered more than anything else in the region, and they paid virtually no attention at all to inter-Arab conflicts, Nasser’s messianic quest to rule all the Arabs from Cairo, and his intent to use Soviet backing to do it. Ike wasn’t interested in distant parochial Arab conflicts. They hardly even registered. He had no place in his worldview to put them. He just wanted to keep the Soviet Union out of the Middle East, and he botched it. Before the end of his second term, the Soviet Union counted not only Egypt as an ally, but also Syria and Iraq….

“The honest broker worldview,” Doran writes, “instilled in Western officials a perverse desire to shun friends and embrace enemies.” That was back in the early 1950s, long before I was born. Washington hasn’t changed much in the meantime.

Kirsch's review finished thus:

Any reader of Ike’s Gamble who is even a little familiar with the current situation will be able to draw the lines connecting Ike with Obama, and Egypt with Iran. Once again, Doran implies, an American president has fallen prey to the delusion that favoring one particular Muslim state is the same thing as being honest broker with the Muslim world. And once again, this approach has succeeded only in emboldening America’s enemies and endangering its friends, especially Saudi Arabia and Israel. This makes Ike’s Gamble a timely intervention into current debates. Obama won’t read it, but Hillary Clinton should.

What Hillary Clinton does or doesn't read is no longer of any relevance. Trump won't read it, but then he's not about to follow the Obama line on Iran. He'll make blunders, no doubt, but not that particular one.