Ike's Gamble: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East by Michael Doran (review)

In Ike's Gamble: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, Michael Doran argues that President Dwight "Eisenhower saw the United States as an honest broker—a mediator helping nationalists seek fair redress from the British" (p. 9). Doran further maintains that Eisenhower's policy of backing President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt backfired spectacularly. He writes, "Nasser used the American fixation on peacemaking as a means of deflecting the attention of Washington from his revolutionary pan-Arab program, which screamed about Zionism and imperialism, but which also sought to eliminate Arab rivals to regional leadership" (p. 11). Instead of creating a stable anti-Communist Arab world, Eisenhower's gamble on Nasser strengthened the hand of the Soviet Union and created even greater turbulence in the Middle East.

Doran does a superb job describing the negotiations of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1954, which removed British troops from the Canal Zone. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who believed in the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain that had been forged during the Second World War, had expected Eisenhower to be more sympathetic to the British than to the Egyptians. Instead, Eisenhower, currying favor with the Arabs, supported Nasser's demands for the British to remove their troops from the Canal Zone. Eisenhower gambled on Nasser's loyalty to the West, hoping that Egypt would lead a future wave of Arab nationalism. Nasser skillfully and successfully played the United States against Great Britain on the issues of colonialism and imperialism.

Doran also provides an excellent explanation of the development of what became the Baghdad Pact and how it divided not only the Arab countries but the United States and Britain as well. His analysis is remarkably perceptive on how the United States moved away from supporting the British and the Baghdad Pact, while at the same time failing to recognize the extremely divisive nature of the pact in the larger Muslim world, particularly between Egypt and Iraq. The Baghdad Pact, with its northern-tier defense plan against the Soviet Union, protected British and Israeli interests in the region while posing a real threat to the pan-Arabism being espoused by Nasser in his 1956 book The Philosophy of the Revolution. Nasser and his agents worked to destabilize and overthrow the governments of pro-Western Arab countries, especially Iraq.

This lucid narrative also explains the many differences between the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. State Department on Egypt. Kermit Roosevelt, a top CIA agent, consistently worked to undermine the Department of State and the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Henry Byroade. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles supported a very hard line on Nasser, whereas Roosevelt pursued a much softer line, revealing a notable split within the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Even deeper were the policy divisions within the State Department about the value of pursuing a peace plan, codenamed "Alpha," between Israel and Egypt.

Nasser, nonetheless, continued his old game of playing the West off against the East. He accepted Soviet arms through a deal with Czechoslovakia in 1955. When the United States finally refused to fund the Aswan Dam, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. This led to the Suez crisis, which many historians still believe to be Eisenhower's greatest victory. The nationalization of the Suez Canal raised a thorny question: Would the United States support Great Britain, France, and Israel or would it support Egypt? Out of concern that British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's war against Egypt would drive the Muslim world into the Soviet sphere of influence, Eisenhower came publicly to the defense of Egypt. The horrible irony of the crisis, according to Doran, is how Eisenhower worked essentially in concert with the Soviet Union for the removal of his Western allies from the Canal Zone, therefore giving a ringing political and propaganda triumph to both Nasser and Moscow...