Suez Crisis 60 years Later

• Ike's Gamble:America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East By Michael Doran, Simon and Schuster
• Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace by Alex von Tunzelmann. Harper Collins Publishers

Ariel Sharon, left, during the Sinai campaign in October of 1956. During the campaign, Sharon made the controversial decision to take the Mitla Pass. Thirty-eight Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting and Sharon was reprimanded by his superiors. He was later accused of provoking the battle unnecessarily.

Suez war began, the world was transfixed by an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. Moscow sent tanks to crush the rebellion, demonstrating that the ostensibly anti-imperialist USSR was itself a brutal imperial power. But whatever moral advantage the West could have derived from this event was lost, because at the same moment Britain and France were invading Egypt for their own purposes.

When a furious Eisenhower sent his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to the United Nations to denounce his own NATO allies, it became clear that the Suez adventure was doomed. (Matters weren’t helped when the Soviets, in an ambiguously worded statement, seemed to be threatening Britain with nuclear war.) The British and French aborted their limited invasion, Israeli troops withdrew, and Anthony Eden resigned from office in disgrace. It was an unmistakable lesson in Cold War geopolitics: The old empires were impotent, and the new superpowers were in charge.

What lessons can we take from the Suez Crisis, six decades later? Von Tunzelmann and Doran offer contrasting answers; the major difference between them has to do with their assessments of Eisenhower, the key decision-maker in the crisis. Von Tunzelmann’s view is captured in the subtitle of Blood and Sand: “Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace.” In her view, Eisenhower is to be praised for stopping the invasion of Egypt: “He had publicly taken a stand in favor of what was right, though that meant opposing two major NATO allies, Britain and France, as well as the United States’ best friend and protégé in the Middle East, Israel.”

Eisenhower, on this view, recognized the legitimacy of Egypt’s claim to the Suez Canal, and of Nasser’s claim to embody the spirit of Arab independence. He was true to the United Nations and its principles, which he himself had done so much to establish in the Second World War. There is a strong suggestion in the book that, if America had kept on the course Eisenhower set in 1956, the rest of the world—especially the Arab world—would be better off today. In particular, Von Tunzelmann admires Eisenhower for distancing America from Israel: “Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were unusual in the 20th                                                          century: an American president and secretary of state who were able and willing to say no to Israel.”

Yet as she observes in the last pages of her book, it was Eisenhower himself who abandoned the neutralist position America adopted in Suez. Just one year later, he announced the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” which committed the U.S. to intervene in defense of any Middle Eastern government threatened by communism. For Von Tunzelmann, this was the beginning of a disastrous period in American Middle East policy that continues today: “Nations and peoples were used as assets or weapons. The enemies of enemies were falsely considered to be friends. Lines were drawn in the sand, blown away, drawn again. All of this was done with precious little foresight about where it might lead.”

Blood and Sand, with its narrow focus on Suez, can do little to explain why Eisenhower’s “campaign for peace” took this turn. But that is Doran’s whole purpose in Ike’s Gamble, whose title turns out to bear a surprising implication. If Eisenhower took a gamble for peace in 1956, Doran believes that it was ultimately a losing one. Ike may have thought he was affirming the power of the United Nations and the independence of the postcolonial world. But, in fact, by empowering Nasser, he ended up damaging both the Middle East and American interests.

The root of Eisenhower’s mistake, Doran argues, was to see the Arab world as a monolithic entity, with Nasser at its helm. In order to appear as an “honest broker” in the Middle East, Eisenhower distanced the U.S. from its traditional allies in order to accommodate Nasser, which he believed would win America the affection of the Arabs at large. What this failed to account for, Doran believes, is that the Arab world was itself riven by national enmities, power struggles, and ideological disagreements. As it turned out, boosting Egypt meant that, less than two years after Suez, the governments of Iraq and Syria were overthrown by Nasserist, pan-Arab movements. (Syria was briefly merged with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic.) Egypt’s rise meant trouble for Saudi Arabia, which since the days of FDR had been America’s most important Arab ally (and oil supplier). And it spelled disaster for Israel, which was forced to fight much more serious wars against Egypt in 1967 and 1973. Neither the U.S. nor the region reaped any benefits from the Nasserist order that Eisenhower helped to sponsor.

Doran spends some time at the end of the book arguing that Eisenhower himself came to regret his position over Suez. He speaks of a notional “Ike of 1958,” whose views had become more realistic about American interests than the Ike of 1956. This idea rests on fairly slim evidence, however, and Doran seems to invest it with more importance than it requires. Really, it is Doran, not Eisenhower himself, who is making the argument that Ike’s gamble was a losing one.

In doing so, he is also making an implicit but unmistakable argument about America’s Middle East policy today. 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.