[Discussion] Containing Arab Nationalism

[sule tarakcioglu]

Salim Yaqub. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and
the Middle East. The New Cold War History Series. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004. x + 377 pp. Pictures, maps,
notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2834-3; $22.50
(paper), ISBN 0-8078-5508-1.
*Reviewed by:* Daniel C. Williamson, Department of Humanities, Hillyer
College, University of Hartford.
*Published by:* H-Diplo <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Ediplo> (August, 2004)
Eisenhower, Nasser, and the Battle for the Arab World

Salim Yaqub's Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and
the Middle East is well placed in a series entitled the "New Cold War
History," as the book exemplifies new trends in the study of diplomatic
history. While not a major component of the book, Yaqub takes notice of
the growing importance of cultural issues among diplomatic historians.
More centrally, Containing Arab Nationalism is a prime example of a
"pericentric" view of the Cold War, as it details the great impact that
regional powers had on the actions of the two superpowers.

As the title clearly suggests, Yaqub sees the Eisenhower Doctrine as
having an additional goal aside from its stated aim of resisting the
spread of "International Communism" into the Middle East. While
Washington did worry that the Soviets might exploit the "vacuum of
power" that appeared in the region following Britain's humiliation in
the Suez Crisis of late 1956, Yaqub argues that containing the radical
form of Pan-Arab nationalism espoused by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel
Nasser was an equally important aim of the Eisenhower administration.
Nasser called for the Arab world to follow a policy of "positive
neutralism" in regard to the Cold War and thus maintain valuable
relationships with the West as well as the Eastern bloc. Although
President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles did not
believe that Nasser was a communist, they did think that his neutralist
stance made him an unwitting pawn of the Soviet Union. Containing Arab
Nationalism details the failed efforts of the United States to
marginalize Nasser and his like-minded allies in the Arab world by
promoting openly anti-communist stances from Middle Eastern nations in
return for U.S. economic and military aid and even support from American
troops.

As Yaqub makes clear, the January 1957 enunciation of the Eisenhower
Doctrine, which pledged the United States to assist any Middle Eastern
nation that was threatened by communism, came as a direct result of the
Suez Crisis. From the point of view of the United States, maintaining
the free flow of oil to Western Europe and keeping the Soviets from
seizing control of that oil were the main strategic goals in the region.
Prior to Suez, the United States had been content to have Great Britain
act as the main protector of Western interests in the area. However,
British collusion with France and Israel in an attack on Egypt in late
1956, designed to reverse Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal and
unseat the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist leader, led to the United
States condemning the attack and forcing the withdrawal of the invaders.
With British influence in the Middle East badly compromised, Yaqub
argues that the Eisenhower administration saw both a need and an
opportunity to take a more active role in the region. The need to
replace Britain was obvious, but Washington also believed that its
support for Egypt during the Suez Crisis gave it new credibility as a
friend of moderate Arab nationalism. Eisenhower and Dulles hoped that
the rise in American popularity, in tandem with the brutal Soviet
suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, would induce most Arab
states to declare their willingness to participate in the Eisenhower
Doctrine. If Egypt and/or its close ally Syria refused to cooperate,
they would be steadily isolated and Arab nationalism could be harnessed
to the West.

According to Yaqub the administration's plan was fatally flawed from the
start. Washington overestimated the public relations bounce that the
United States received from the Suez Crisis. Arab sentiments were more
upset about displaced Palestinians than massacred Hungarians, and
despite the Eisenhower administration's often cool relations with
Israel, America was still seen as a supporter of the Jewish state. Nor
had the United States pressed Britain to withdraw from its remaining
positions in the Persian Gulf. In addition, the conservative regimes
that Washington hoped would be counterweights to Nasser (Iraq, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon in particular) all lacked popular domestic
support and proved to be weak allies. The author proceeds to show how
the Eisenhower Doctrine, despite some initial optimism in Washington,
quickly revealed its inadequacy. In Yaqub's view, Washington missed the
inherent weaknesses of the Eisenhower Doctrine, in part, because "a
certain smugness had always been a feature of Eisenhower's and Dulles's
foreign policy, and this was especially so in early 1957" (p. 115).

Yaqub explains that the period from the official launch of the
Eisenhower Doctrine in March 1957 until the early summer of that same
year saw the brief heyday of the administration's plan. There were a
number of developments that gave Washington unwarranted optimism during
that period despite the fact that only a handful of Middle eastern
states, including Lebanon and Iraq, formally endorsed the Eisenhower
Doctrine. The shaky reign of a young, conservative King Hussein of
Jordan survived an attempted coup by pro-Nasser forces. The party of the
pro-Western president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun, won a lopsided
victory in parliamentary elections over a number of parties that did not
support close association with the West. The competing Arab dynasties in
Iraq and Saudi Arabia began a rapprochement, seeming to pave the way for
the isolation of Nasser. However, Yaqub makes a good argument that these
apparent successes masked underlying problems. While the Western-leaning
Hussein had survived in Jordan, the public support for Nasserism in his
country make the king unwilling to publicly embrace the Eisenhower
Doctrine. The Maronite Christian Chamoun's victory in Lebanon upset the
delicate balance among the various confessional groups in the country: a
development that the Eisenhower administration would come to regret by
the summer of 1958. Nor had Saudi Arabia and Iraq really set the stage
for a conservative bloc in Arab politics. Iraq's status as the only Arab
member of the British-led Baghdad Pact continued to isolate the Iraqi
monarchy. Saudi Arabia's King Saud, whom Eisenhower hoped to make into
the leader of a pro-Western Arab coalition, still vacillated between his
desires to appease Nasserism and cement his ties to the West.

If the deficiencies of the Eisenhower Doctrine were masked by the
apparently pro-Western trend of events in the first half of 1957, Yaqub
argues that Washington's failed attempt during the second half of the
year to overthrow the increasingly leftist Syrian government was the
first clear defeat of the doctrine. To make matters worse, Yaqub writes,
the attempt to replace the Syrian government "helped unleash a regional
crisis that quickly became a world crisis as well" (p. 147). While Syria
was hardly dominated by communists, it established a trade relationship
with Moscow in August 1957 and began to import Soviet arms: a move that
alarmed Washington as well as Syria's neighbors. After a clumsy failure
to engineer a military coup against the regime, Washington
unsuccessfully attempted to induce the conservative Arab states to
invade Syria with the support of American money and Turkish troops if
necessary. However, Jordan and Iraq balked at the prospect of being seen
as the tools of American policy. The president tried to convince Saudi
Arabia to head an anti-Syrian bloc to halt the spread of "godless
communism," but as Yaqub bitingly writes, "Saud ... had little interest
in Eisenhower's jihad" (p. 162).

Having played with fire by supporting an invasion of Syria, the
Eisenhower administration nearly created an uncontrollable
conflagration. Against Washington's advice, Turkey insisted that it
would launch a unilateral invasion of Syria if the Arab states would not
act. In response to Turkish troop movements to the Syrian frontier,
Moscow issued a stern warning that a Turkish attack would bring a
military response from the Soviet Union. A combination of regional and
UN diplomacy, and American pressure on Turkey, averted a Turkish-Syrian
war and the possibility of a resulting superpower conflict, but the
United States had singularly failed to replace the Syrian regime itself
or rally the conservative Arab governments to achieve that goal. The
final irony to the Syrian crisis, as Yaqub points out, is that once the
Eisenhower administration settled on a hands-off policy of containing
the government in Damascus, the Arab states, including Egypt, pushed
Syria into reducing its ties to the Soviet Union because of their own
aversion to communism. In the wake of the Syrian failure, President
Eisenhower began to have doubts about the drive to isolate Nasser, but
Dulles dissuaded him from pursuing detente with Egypt.

Eisenhower's doubts about the plan to isolate Nasser were confirmed by
the events of early 1958. Yaqub describes the first quarter of 1958 as
the "Nasserist Onslaught": a period when Nasser's power and prestige
grew in the Arab world. The book details the complex internal political
forces that drove the Syrian government to seek union with Egypt. The
establishment of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in February 1958 gave
Nasser control over Syria, electrified Arab nationalists throughout the
region, and terrified his conservative Arab foes. The Arab Union,
hastily formed by Iraq and Jordan as a conservative alternative to the
radical UAR proved to be a sham, with little public support or real
cooperation between the two monarchies. Saudi Arabia's King Saud took
the desperate course of trying to have Nasser assassinated. When the
plot was revealed in March 1958, the moderately pro-Western Saudi king
was virtually replaced by his brother, Crown Prince Faisal, who was
determined not to antagonize the popular UAR leader. Faced with the
growth of Nasser's prestige, and the failure of the conservative regimes
to act as a counterweight, the Eisenhower administration moved to forge
better relations with Nasser and resume limited military sales and aid
programs to Egypt, while downplaying public support for the pro-Western
Arab governments.

However, just as the administration was on the verge of abandoning the
Eisenhower Doctrine, the United States became more deeply involved in
Arab politics than ever before. The apparent plan of firmly pro-Western
Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, seeking to amend the constitution
and run for a second term in office, sparked a low-level armed revolt by
his mainly Muslim opponents in the spring of 1958. Covertly aided by the
UAR, the revolt caused Chamoun to plead for Western intervention, but as
Yaqub points out, the Eisenhower administration exhibited very little
enthusiasm for sending in the Marines. Rescuing Chamoun, whom the
administration viewed as the author of his own troubles, would upset the
administration's hopes for rapprochement with Nasser.

Despite Washington's jaundiced view of the Lebanese president, events
conspired to make support of Chamoun seem a necessity. In Jordan, King
Hussein was once again threatened by a pro-Nasser coup, and on July 14
the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown by the Nasser-inspired Free Officers
movement. With America's Arab allies in such peril, the administration
made the decision to intervene in Lebanon and support British
intervention in Jordan. Yaqub makes it clear that the decision was not
taken lightly by Washington, as it ran counter to the emerging consensus
to pull back from the Eisenhower Doctrine. Dulles predicted that there
would be a terrible backlash against America in the Arab world, but that
the more catastrophic alternative of taking no action would be the
destruction of American credibility with all of its Cold War allies.
Reluctantly Eisenhower and Dulles agreed that Chamoun had to be saved by
military intervention.

The American intervention in Lebanon did allow for a peaceful transition
to a new president, and did not create the firestorm that Washington
feared, but the Eisenhower administration continued to retreat from the
doctrine. By October 1958, a National Security Council paper (NSC
5820/1) outlined the new American policy in the Middle East. The new
document named the free flow of oil and the exclusion of Soviet
influence as the major U.S. goals in the region, and concluded that
these were not incompatible with Arab nationalism, even radical Arab
nationalism. Nasser's recent quarrel with the Soviet Union, and his
anti-communist stance in general, made it easier for the Eisenhower
administration to try to work in cooperation with Pan-Arab nationalists.

While it seems of secondary importance to the author, the issue of the
intersection of culture and diplomacy is addressed in the book. In his
introduction, Yaqub outlines the two main schools of thought on the
subject. In one camp is the "clash of civilization" view held most
prominently by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, which argues that
the Muslim world is fundamentally hostile to the modern values of the
West, thus making Arab-Western relations at best difficult. The other
view, expressed by Edward Said and Douglas Little, is that Western
racism towards Arabs has been a traditional block to close ties between
the West and the Arab world. Yaqub respectfully disagrees with both of
these analyses. While acknowledging the reality of cultural differences,
Yaqub argues that the modernizing Nasserists and the Americans shared
common values, but differed on practical issues such as Israel, European
imperialism, and the level of the communist threat to the Middle East.
While not dismissing the existence of Western racism towards the Arabs,
Yaqub finds little evidence that Eisenhower's policies were shaped by
any underlying racist philosophy, but rather by American self-interest.
On the whole he contends that, "Eisenhower's feud with Nasser was not a
conflict over values; it was a contest of interest" (p. 271).

On the whole Containing Arab Nationalism makes a very valuable
contribution to the study of Eisenhower's foreign policy and the
interaction of the Cold War and Middle Eastern politics. Yaqub does not
give the administration very high marks for its management of
Arab-American relations. The Eisenhower Doctrine is pictured as a plan
based on obsessive fear of communist expansion in detriment to a more
rational Middle Eastern policy. The administration overestimated its own
political power following the Suez Crisis and underestimated the appeal
of Nasser and Pan-Arab nationalism. Yaqub also shows the Eisenhower
administration swinging between dangerous adventurism, such as its
attempt to overthrow the Syrian government, and practical statesmanship,
such as its ultimate recognition that it was better to try to placate
Nasser than to isolate him. With his exploration of inter-Arab politics,
Yaqub demonstrates how both Nasser and the conservative regimes were
able to capitalize on the Cold War: Nasser by playing the Soviets off
against the Americans, and pro-Western leaders by exploiting Western
fears of communist expansion. Yaqub's use of Arabic language sources
helps him to correctly portray the Arab leaders as actors who were
center stage in the regional diplomatic and domestic conflicts. The
United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all played
secondary, albeit important, roles in what was mainly an Arab versus
Arab, and sometimes Arab versus Jew, political drama. Containing Arab
Nationalism is a thoroughly researched, well-argued, and clearly
presented look at the rise and fall of the Eisenhower Doctrine and a
vital work for any scholar interested in the topic.

Library of Congress Call Number: DS63.2.U5 Y37 2004

Subjects:

    * Arab nationalism.
    * Middle East--Foreign relations--United States.
    * United States--Foreign relations--Middle East.
    * United States--Foreign relations--1953-1961.