British Military Intervention and the Struggle for Jordan: King Hussein, Nasser and the Middle East Crisis, 1955–1958 (review)

The Suez crisis has cast such a long shadow over the history of British involvement in the postwar Middle East that serious scholars have struggled to persuade students and nonspecialists alike to pay any attention at all to Britain’s role in the region after 1956. Stephen Blackwell’s study of the circumstances surrounding the British military intervention in Jordan in 1958 is therefore a welcome addition to the now considerable body of scholarly research aimed at illuminating this post-1956 British role. Although Blackwell’s book does not change the basic lines of interpretation of the British intervention laid down in earlier works, including my own study, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser (New York: Macmillan, 1996), it does offer a considerable amount of useful and important detail to flesh out our understanding of British policymaking in the period. Particularly commendable is the fact that Blackwell has mined recently declassified materials at the British National Archives to update his Ph.D. thesis, which was originally completed over a decade ago.

Blackwell argues that the British policymaking establishment harboured competing positions, which he terms “Arabist” and “interventionist.” Even after the Suez debacle, the interventionists, who included in their number such powerful figures as the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Gerald Templer, advocated wide-ranging British operations in the Middle East to extirpate the influence of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. When the Iraqi monarchy fell in July 1958, the interventionists seized their opportunity to act. They regarded British military intervention in Jordan as the first stage in a broader operation that would overthrow the revolutionaries in Iraq and perhaps extend to Syria and Egypt.

The “Arabists,” meanwhile, who not surprisingly included a number of key Foreign Office officials but also several influential military figures such as the First Sea Lord, Louis Mountbatten, did not believe that Britain possessed the military capabilities to embark on such operations. Moreover, they did not think that military action would be effective either in defeating Nasser or in preserving pro-Western regimes in the region. Rather, the more sophisticated advocates of this position in the Foreign Office, who included the Deputy Under Secretary, Sir Roger Stevens, argued that Britain should recognize that Arab nationalism was an organic movement. Nasser had not created it; nor did he control it. A more effective British strategy would be to use information, propaganda, and persuasion to try to channel Arab nationalist sentiment in directions that were less destructive from the standpoint of British interests in the region.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who ultimately possessed the deciding vote in these debates, was an interventionist by temperament, but an Arabist on reflection. Although he, too, initially saw the intervention in Jordan as priming the pump for broader action in the region, he quickly retreated from this position once it was clear that the Eisenhower administration would not lend its support to a general anti-Nasser campaign. Blackwell concludes that the contemporaneous U.S. intervention in Lebanon was not part of a combined Anglo-American operation. Rather, each power acted for its own reasons, although the British, who lacked the necessary logistical support for their forces in Jordan, required U.S. assistance. In fact, the Eisenhower administration was rightly cautious in its broader approach to the region. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles candidly admitted, the United States was simply “not sophisticated enough” in its understanding of Iraqi internal politics to contemplate any direct intervention as the situation unfolded.

If there is a weakness in this book, it lies in the fact that the indigenous actors, especially King Hussein of Jordan, emerge as one-dimensional characters. Blackwell did not undertake work in Jordan itself, so he is left largely to formulate the motives and perspectives of the king from British and American sources. Certainly some officials, particularly the British ambassador Charles...