Our Mistakes in the Middle East

by J. C. HUREWITZ

1

FOR any American at all interested in the Middle East no recent book can make more disturbing reading than Robert J. Donovan’s Eisenhower: The Inside Story. The importance of this best seller lies in its author’s enjoyment of a privileged access to the inner councils of the White House. The book has widely been regarded as an informal presentation of the Eisenhower Administration’s record as it would like the public to see it. Yet in some four hundred pages devoted to every major aspect of its policy at home and abroad, with chapters on Korea, Red China, the Bermuda conference, Indochina, Formosa, and Geneva, there are just three scattered references to the Middle East — and even these shed no light on the Administration’s thinking about this pivotal area of the globe.

This strange silence bears eloquent testimony to the fact that the Administration — like the American people in general — has been running away from the growingly serious problems of the Middle East. A curious notion seems to have pervaded Washington the last few years: the notion that somehow, in some miraculous way, these problems will solve themselves and will, like desert mirages, eventually dissolve into thin air.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this tendency was provided by the “summit conference” at Geneva in July, 1955. A few weeks before the conference opened, the State Department already had information that the Russians were negotiating in Cairo for a possible barter of modern war weapons for Egyptian long-staple cotton. In September, 1955, just two months after the conference, a deal was indeed consummated for the delivery of an estimated $200 million worth of Soviet arms to Egypt. Yet not once — so far as is publicly known — in the week-long meeting at Geneva which had brought the leaders of the Great Powers together was the question of their relations in the Middle East so much as mentioned.

When the historians of the future come to write the history of our times, they may well select the crucial period from July to September, 1955, as marking the turning point in the evolution of the Cold War. The Soviet-Egyptian arms deal abruptly ended the West’s monopoly of the modern weapons market in the postwar Middle East. It enabled the Soviet Union to seize the political initiative in the strategic heart of the region even before Great Britain had completed the evacuation of its forces from the irreplaceable base at Suez. It caught the United States and its NATO allies flat-footed, and to this day they have not regained their diplomatic composure.

The continuous stream of history admittedly knows no sharp breaks. Even revolutions require hatching and grow out of conditions that triumphant revolutionaries help to refashion. But it is essential, I think, that we bear in mind the decisive nature of the diplomatic breakthrough that the U.S.S.R. scored in the early autumn of 1955. It ended, in effect, a postwar decade characterized above all else by a series of Soviet blunders in the Middle East. The conduct of Russian policy in that region from 1945 through 1954 showed as much finesse as a driverless bulldozer ploughing through the crowded mid-town street of a provincial capital. But what we should not forget is that this erratic behavior was due far more to the excesses and blindness of Stalinism than to any sagacity or foresight on our part.

In the past twelve months, however, there has occurred a radical shift in the tide. The “destalinized” Kremlin has palpably changed its methods and manners, and Washington can no longer afford a pedestrian diplomacy, conducted on a business-as-usual basis without real reflection and with ideas and programs derived largely from experience in other areas and listlessly applied to the Middle East, Close examination will reveal that the United States has followed a defensive course in the Middle East since the end of World War II. But in the first postwar decade, particularly after 1946, Washington’s Middle East policy could be characterized as relatively dynamic. In the past year, however, the United States has moved from a dynamic to a static defense and, correspondingly, from a willingness to experiment to almost morbid refusal to take any action whatsoever.

How then have we allowed ourselves to be maneuvered into this position of weakness? Could we have halted the sudden decline in our political fortunes and perhaps have avoided our present predicament altogether? Or was the disintegration of our influence and prestige something that was bound to happen sooner or later?

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THE first thing that needs saying in any appraisal of our position in the Middle East is that we are newcomers to responsibility in this sensitive part of the world. As recently as the Second World War and, indeed, right up to the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in March, 1947, we tended — government and public alike—to look upon the Middle East as an almost exclusively British sphere. Even with the progressive broadening of our containment policy in the years that followed, the United States continued to conduct its diplomacy in the Middle East with one arm tied behind ils back. For the prior presence of Britain, particularly in the Arab zone, inhibited Washington from dealing freely or directly with local governments and local peoples.

This was the case in the Crown Colonies of Aden and Cyprus, in the protectorates of Aden, and in the veiled protectorates stretching along the Arabian shore of the Persian Gulf; it was the case in mandated Palestine (until 1948) and in the Sudan under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium (through 1955). The external relations of these lands, under varying forms and degrees of British administration, were conducted not on the spot but at the Foreign Office — at times with Colonial Office assistance — in London. Also, in those countries attached to Britain by preferential alliances — Jordan, Libya, Egypt (until 1954), and Iraq (until 1955) — the United States has had to respect the established rights and special interests of its principal NATO ally no less than the claims and attitudes of the Arab peoples concerned.

Even in those lands where the absence of overt British control left the United States free to act on its own — Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen — American initiative was either slow and hesitant in asserting itself or else has suffered from arrested growth. In Iran at the time of the enunciation of our containment policy, Washington hopefully—and as it turned out erroneously — estimated that the Soviet menace had been overcome when the Shah’s government reimposed its authority over Azerbaijan in December, 1946. In the Arab world the humiliation of defeat in the war against Israel was transformed by most nationalists into a conviction that the United States, by its allegedly unconditional support of Israel, was the main culprit. American policy on Palestine, in reality, so gyrated in its course in the crucial period 1947-1950 that it was impossible to identify the United States with any single position for any length of time. What was of significance in multiplying our difficulties, however, was not the objective truth of the matter but the stubborn reality of the Arabs’ unreasoning belief. And what continued to anger the Arab nationalists, of course, was the fact that we withheld our blessings from their demands, which in essence called for the dissolution of Israel. It was this that kept alive the sentiment in Arab lands that the United States was irremediably proIsrael, and it explains the continuing rise in antiAmerican feeling over the Palestine issue throughout most of the Arab sphere even after 1953, when official American policy began noticeably to favor the Arab cause.

In retrospect, therefore, we can see that it was our lack of experience, the complications involved in conducting diplomacy via the British Foreign Office, and Arab emotionalism on the Palestine issue that frustrated the United States in its search for viable Middle East policies. But the absence of such policies in the first postwar decade did not prove disastrous, simply because Moscow’s blustering diplomacy by intimidation and subversion more than canceled out our handicaps, timidity, and mistaken judgments.

The diplomatic activities of a Great Power can rarely be explained in simple terms, and Russia was obviously motivated by many considerations in throwing its weight around against Turkey and Iran in 1945 and 1946. But Moscow’s intent was clear enough: it was to surround the Soviet Union on the south with the same kind of buffer zone that the Kremlin was establishing at the time in Eastern Europe. This was the meaning of the Kremlin’s denunciation in March, 1945, of the Russo-Turkish neutrality treaty, and of its later demands for military and naval bases on the Straits and for the Turkish provinces of Kars and Ardahan. It was also the aim behind Russia’s organization of a pro-Soviet separatist movement in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Even after these moves had failed and Stalin apparently had decided that it would be more prudent in the Middle East not to repeat such experiments in actual or impending territorial aggression, Moscow still did not abandon its attempts to bully the states of the region into a dread of threatened Soviet retaliation. Any action taken by a Middle East state that was in the least favorable to the West the Kremlin immediately denounced as inimical to Russia’s interests, while appeals to Moscow for constructive coöperation or assistance met with an icy silence. Instead of trying to pry the Arab League loose from its residual Western moorings by espousing its cause during and after the Palestine War, Moscow went on denouncing the Arab leaders indiscriminately as “reactionary.” Moscow insisted that it would have nothing to do with the League until it was taken over by “progressives” — by which it meant the handful of Arab Communists and cryptoCommunists who even then were being hounded by Arab governments, but whom the Kremlin still obstinately encouraged.

If no Middle East state, prior to 1955, received economic or technical assistance from the Soviet bloc, this was simply because neither Russia nor her satellites made any such offers. Nor did Russia or her satellites try to supply military equipment to the Middle East — with the single minor exception of Czechoslovakia, which did sell some surplus arms to Israel in 1948. Above all, Russia sought only once to obtain a share of the Middle East petroleum bonanza — in northern Iran — and she went about it with such a characteristic lack of subtlety that the Iranian parliament, in white anger over this overt Russian pressure, nullified the proposed fifty-year concession in October, 1947, before it became legally binding.

On the positive side, the United States and its allies deserve credit for foiling in 1945-1946 the heavy-handed Soviet designs on Turkey and Iran through the application of strong moral support. Our Turkish aid program, economic as well as military, prospered until 1954. We prevented Russia at the UN from gaining an entering wedge in the Middle East through the back door of the Palestine problem. When on May 25, 1950, the United States, Britain, and France issued a joint declaration on arms sales, they were in a position to regulate the flow of munitions inlo the restive Arab-Israel area. The three-power statement also guaranteed existing frontiers and armistice lines. The outbreak of the Korean War, just one month later, tended, furthermore, to underline the firmness of American intentions and to reinforce the utility of the Tripartite Declaration as a deterrent to the renewal of fighting between the Arab states and Israel. Finally, American mediation in 1953-1954 of the three-year-old Anglo-Iranian oil dispute reconciled conflicting purposes and preserved the company-government payments structure in the Middle East, which since 1950-1952 has rested on an equal division of the profits.

All these measures represent the positive side of the coin. But the coin had a negative side with which we have become familiar in recent times. Our very success in maintaining a Western monopoly over the development of the oil resources of the Middle East did little to endear us to its inhabitants. Our offers of economic and technical aid to the Arab countries failed to receive the full appreciation we expected, because they were matched by similar programs of assistance to Israel and also because the implementation of an aid program designed to raise general living standards was bound to undermine the privileged status of the dominant classes in the several Arab lands. But it was, above all, in the realm of Middle East defense that our real weaknesses were beginning to manifest themselves, and these in no small measure resulted from our own bungling behavior.

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FROM the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire finally disintegrated, down to the end of World War II, the Middle East fell unquestionably into the Western sphere of influence. Britain’s military, naval, and air bases that honeycombed the region from end to end were complemented in Lebanon and Syria by French garrisons. This position of military strength proved vital to Britain and its allies in World War II. But in the postwar years the French and British military regimes in the Middle East have been dismantled piece by piece. The first blow was delivered in 1946 when the French were compelled to withdraw their forces from Lebanon and Syria, and successive blows followed in 1948 when the British surrendered Palestine and in 1954-1956 when they evacuated the Suez Canal zone. Each retreat represented a camouflaged victory for the Soviet Union, which has never been happy about the presence of Western garrisons, particularly air bases, on its highly exposed southern flank — an area that it is as concerned about as we are about the Caribbean. For Russia in the Middle East adjoins the non-Communist world without benefit of an intervening satellite zone.

While French and British military power was vanishing, the United States failed to fill the resulting vacuum. Admittedly, Turkey was integrated into NATO in February, 1952, and hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into modernizing its army and naval bases and erecting a string of airfields in Anatolia, on the back doorstep of the Soviet Union. Turkey was thus tied militarily and diplomatically to the West. But elsewhere in the Middle East, Failed States moves were limited to bilateral military aid agreements, to stumbling efforts to establish a regional security organization, and to the construction of one heavy bomber base in Libya and another in Saudi Arabia, the last of which is currently under renegotiation with no more than touch-and-go prospects of success. These air bases, complementing those in Morocco, were established to appease the global “edifice complex" of the United States Strategic Air Command and to prepare for the terrible eventualities of an all-out war with Russia; they were not built or maintained

—as the Suez base and the lesser nearby establishments were— for the simultaneous peacetime purpose of enabling the Western powers to bring their military pressure to bear on local governments and to keep them in line.

Our desire not to assume military responsibilities in this area was illustrated most graphically by our sponsorship of the Baghdad Pact. One of John Foster Dulles’s early initiatives after assuming the office of Secretary of State in 1953 was to advance the idea of a “northern tier" defense system for the Middle East, to replace the earlier conceptions of a Middle East Command and a Middle East Defense Organization which had fizzled out in 1951— 1952. In 1955 this initiative eventually yielded the Baghdad Pact, uniting Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan with Britain in a formal military alliance. But far from growing into a formidable military instrument, the alliance has proved to be a colossus with feet of clay. On all sides it has stirred up hornets’ nests and heightened local tensions.

Because Iraq was a founding member, the Baghdad Pact excited the fear of Israel, which naturally took a dim view of any reinforcement of the Arabs’ military potential. It provoked the enmity of Egypt, whose military junta sensed a threat to its leadership in the Arab world, and from Egypt hostility to the pact spread to Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Because Pakistan was a member, the pact earned the antagonism of India and Afghanistan, both of whom are locked in border disputes with their Muslim neighbor. Because Britain was a member, it drew fire from Arab nationalists who saw in the pact a devious scheme for resuscitating British “imperialism.” And because —once the furor was aroused — the United States refused fully to join the alliance, the pact became an object of ridicule. Our fence-straddling behavior weakened the resolve of those Middle East states that were leaning toward the West, while it strengthened the resolve of those that were antagonistic toward the pact.

These lamentable consequences, it is clear, sprang from a policy aimed at applying to the Middle East ideas of collective security that had been tried and proved in Western Europe. Our national security planners chose to overlook the simple fact that the Middle East does not in any way resemble Western Europe, not having the industry, trained managers, technicians, skilled labor, or the wealth to sustain a really modern military establishment. Nor did it apparently occur to American policy-makers that a regional military organization on the NATO pattern might not be feasible in an area where the guns of your next-door neighbor worry you more than the crisis of the Cold War. Above all, they closed their eyes to the essential fact that what gives NATO its strength is the presence of American forces on the continent of Europe, and the stationing of American troops in the Middle East — assuming that we ourselves were prepared to put them there—is precisely what most states in the region would resist to the bitter end.

It is clear enough, of course, why our policymakers in Washington have consistently refused to envisage the idea of American troops taking up stations at critical points in the Middle East. Imperialism has gone out of fashion in the West. Besides, the United States has never entertained any territorial ambitions in the Middle East. Our principal desire has been to avoid arousing against Americans that dislike and xenophobia which have hitherto been trained at the expiring imperialism of the French and British. It is also in the American tradition to support the principle of national selfdetermination wherever it manifests itself.

The option before the United States, patently, was not an easy one: either to endorse the efforts of our allies to hold on to the military controls, direct or indirect, that they possessed, at least for the duration of the Cold War; or to give our blessings to the demands of the nationalists for the unqualified relinquishment of these controls. If we bowed to our sympathies and came out in support of the local nationalists, we risked alienating Britain and France and undermining the diplomatic unity of NATO. If, on the other hand, we chose to stick by our Western allies, we faced the prospect of uniting the emergent states of Asia and Africa against the West. In every dispute that has arisen, our policy-makers in Washington have sought to steer a middle course between our obligations to our allies and our sympathies for the cause of the nationalists. This was the theory behind our diplomacy. In effect, however, we have always adopted the second choice; and to render it more palatable to our allies, we have taken the decision piecemeal, thus ending up almost invariably outraging both sides.

4

SINCE the end of World War II the United States has pursued this policy of mediation in various forms and with varying results in Syria and Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, and the French territories of North Africa. Of these, our contribution to ending Britain’s quarrel with Egypt over the Sudan and the base in the Suez Canal zone provides the classic and most important example.

Immediately after World War II Cairo broached the question of revising the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty, which authorized Britain to maintain military bases on Egyptian soil. The Egyptian government made simultaneous overtures to settle its differences with Britain over the existing status of the Sudan. The negotiations jogged along from deadlock to deadlock, fraying nerves on both sides in the process. The first real opportunity to resolve the issues came after the military coup d’etat in the summer of 1952, when Egypt’s playboy king, Farouk, was forced to abdicate and the old-line politicians were pushed into retirement. In the months of negotiation that followed, the American ambassador in Cairo, Jefferson Caffery, played a leading role. It was largely in response to his support of Egyptian demands and to the pressures that he brought to bear on his British colleagues in Cairo that London consented first (in February, 1953) to settle the controversy over the Sudan and finally (in October, 1954) to evacuate the Suez base by stages over an eighteen-month period.

Not long after the conclusion of this prolonged diplomatic duel, we discovered that our principal ally had lost its key military base in the Middle East, on which rested the entire structure of its regional defense system, so central to overall Western defense plans for Europe, Asia, and Africa. Not only did the Egyptian government refuse in the ensuing year to show any gratitude for our mediatory role by agreeing to coöperate with us in the establishment, of a new defense system, but it greeted each new gesture of generosity on our part with intensifying arrogance and scorn. Why, we may well ask, did all this happen?

Ever since the Suez Canal crisis exploded last summer, we have taken to blaming Gamal Abdel Nasser for the recent woes that have befallen the West in the Middle East. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we have only ourselves to blame. The negotiations on the Sudan and the Suez base were not completed overnight. We had time to press for a concrete Egyptian quid pro quo to match the concessions of the British. We could have insisted that the British evacuation of the Canal zone be tied to Egypt’s adherence, if not to a Western-sponsored Middle East security system, at least to a bilateral military arrangement with the United States. Instead, our policy-makers in Washington elected to believe that verbal promises of coöperation sufficed and that the Egyptian “Young Turks" who had seized power in 1952 could do no wrong.

The military junta that took possession of the Egyptian Delta in 1952 comprised young army officers who had not yet learned their political or economic alpha beta. These men did, admittedly, inject a breath of fresh air into the suffocating atmosphere of corruption and nepotism under Cairo’s ancien régime. For the first time in its modern history, Egypt found itself with a government openly dedicated to serving the interests not of one class but of the country as a whole. What the regime visibly lacked in political, economic, and social experience, it more than made up in good will. The Western powers, particularly the United States, were favorably impressed. Yet there was little reason for assuming that, because the junta was pursuing an enlightened policy at home, it would as a matter of course pursue a coöperative policy abroad in its relations with the West. In fact, throughout the summer and fall of 1953 the military government, then nominally headed by Major General Mohammed Naguib, conducted a vigorous anti-British campaign in preparation for the selfgovernment elections in the Sudan. During the prolonged stalemate over the Suez question, from October, 1953, to July, 1954, the Revolution Command Council (as the Egyptian junta styled itself) stepped up the hostile campaign in Cairo, directing it at the United States as well as England. It was odd, in the circumstances, for our diplomats to believe that the military officers who had unleashed the propaganda campaign would prove any less nationalistic or more pro-Western than their predecessors. The Department of State should, at the very least, have expected that military officers who had staged a coup d’état for the ostensible purpose of abolishing corruption in the army would be highly sensitive about anything affecting the selfesteem and needs of the army and, indeed, the morale and prestige of the country at large.

As it was, the American Embassy in Cairo learned the lesson the hard way. Soon after the signing of the Suez agreement in October, 1954, the Revolution Command Council in Cairo requested from the United States heavy military “hardware.” Washington responded favorably. As required by Congress under the Mutual Security Act, the Administration proposed a bilateral agreement between the United States and Egypt in which the latter, as a recipient of American military aid, would formally associate itself with the purposes of Western collective security arrangements and accept the aid and advice of an American military mission. The junta, however, rejected these conditions as tantamount to the reintroduction into Egypt of “imperialist ” controls. The only recourse left to Washington was to offer reimbursable military aid. But Egypt did not have the dollars to pay for the modern tanks and jet planes that the Revolution Command Council insisted on buying. So the negotiations reached an impasse, which lasted until Cairo contracted its deal with Czechoslovakia and Russia in September, 1955. The SovietEgyptian arms transaction was the price that Washington had to pay for its failure to strike a hard bargain with Egypt in the autumn of 1954, when Washington, like London, still had a firm grasp on the situation.

Colonel Abdel Nasser’s announcement of the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal, one might think, would have brought our national security planners up with a start and have spurred them to a fundamental rethinking of our fawning approach to our relations with Cairo. Unfortunately the public disclosure of this major diplomatic breakthrough hit Washington in the immediate wake of President Eisenhower’s heart attack, when the capital was in an unusually nervous state. Instead of taking a cold, considered view of the new situation thus presented, the Department of State hastily dispatched to Cairo its director of Middle East affairs in a desperate last-minute attempt to divert the Egyptian government from the course on which it had already embarked. Immediately after this utterly useless mission, instead of waiting for Egypt to appeal to us, Washington, with London in tow, began pleading with Cairo to accept Western financial aid for the construction of the Aswan High Dam, to forestall a possible Soviet offer.

These moves contributed inevitably to building up Abdel Nasser as a great leader and popular hero everywhere in the Arab world, and to persuading him to raise Egypt’s ante to our bid on the Aswan Dam, with the result that here again the negotiations stalled throughout last winter. A sound diplomatic riposte to Egypt’s recalcitrance would have been our adhering to the Baghdad Pact. Instead, Washington maintained its aloofness. This underlined Britain’s shrinking prestige and allowed Abdel Nasser to frighten Jordan out of joining the pact and then into cashiering Glubb Pasha. Secretary Dulles’s belated effort on July 19, 1956, to correct the original mistake of seven months earlier by canceling the Aswan Dam offer, precisely at a time when Egypt had finally condescended to accept our terms, brought the game of diplomatic poker to its logical climax. On July 26, Colonel Abdel Nasser abruptly nationalized the Suez Canal, thereby confronting us with an unprecedented challenge to our prestige throughout the Middle East and even in South Asia beyond.

Our position has not improved since then. Indeed, Secretary Dulles’s handling of the Suez dispute has afforded us a dizzying exhibition of American Middle East diplomacy—with rapid shiftings of endorsement from our Western allies to Egypt and back again. Dulles may well have established a diplomatic record in reversal of position early in October, when he undertook to amend an official transcript of a press conference just two hours after holding it, though too late to prevent the damage.

Even after the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal had destroyed the West’s monopoly over the modern weapons market in the Middle East, it was still possible for the United States, Britain, and France to reaffirm, under the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, their position as the ultimate guardians of peace in the explosive Arab-Israel area. A good chance to do so was offered last spring when ArabIsrael tension was nearing the boiling point. As recently as April 17, the Russians gave unmistakable signs of being prepared to soft-pedal their support of the Arabs in order to ensure the success of United Nations efforts to reduce local tensions. Moscow was manifestly afraid that a serious deterioration of the situation might bring Western military forces back into the region, something that it is anxious to avoid at all costs.

The United States and its allies should then have stated unequivocally that they meant to work through the United Nations to reinforce the ArabIsrael armistice system, but that they would have no hesitation whatsoever in committing their troops to restore order if the UN failed in its mission. Had we thus reaffirmed to the Russians, as well as to the Arabs and the Israelis, our solemn determination to keep the peace under the Tripartite Declaration, it is hardly likely that we should have been challenged. A vigorous stand at that time would have helped subsequently in reducing Abdel Nasser to size. But having failed to take that step because of the Eisenhower Administration’s tendency to avoid all possible risk of committing United States forces, we have completely destroyed the deterrent value of the Tripartite Declaration, and with it our military prestige in the Near East.

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WE MUST ask ourselves now why it is that we have committed this series of blunders in dealing with Egypt and the nearby Middle Eastern lands. It is clear that our diplomatic difficulties have been compounded in the past year by the entry of the Soviet Union as a dynamic force into this region precisely at a time when the relations between the Middle East and the West have been undergoing revolutionary readjustments. The defense of our interests in such circumstances would have taxed the ingenuity of a Franklin or a Talleyrand. Yet it should not have exceeded the capabilities of our statesmen to provide for a gradual and orderly retreat from our most vulnerable positions instead of a precipitous rout.

With its arms monopoly broken, its guardianship of the region’s security virtually given up, its bases progressively abandoned, and its prestige in large part destroyed, the West must recognize that it can no longer hold the Middle East states in line through unilateral declarations of policy. Since we can hardly expect Russia to join us in promoting stability in the Middle East, we shall probably discover that Middle Eastern regional disputes and recurring threats to the peace can most realistically be handled through the United Nations Security Council. While the Russians can, of course, use the Council as a sounding board for their propaganda and can veto Western proposals, we may reciprocate in kind. We can indeed make it clear to the nonSoviet world, as we have not succeeded recently in doing, that in the long run the interests of the Middle East states are not antagonistic to, but at many points are coincident with, those of the West. As we have seen, only the Security Council could provide a sufficiently neutral meeting-ground to bring together the foreign ministers not only of the four Great Powers but of Egypt, to consider the Suez dispute in an atmosphere conducive to negotiation.

In view of the fact that the Russians have seized the initiative with their new emphasis on “competitive coexistence,” we may well find it politically advisable to play down the military aspects of our relations with the Middle East and to play up the economic. But if we do, then we must recognize the fact that economic rivalry with Russia may at times dictate measures that are, strictly speaking, economically unprofitable—measures similar to our wartime pre-emptive purchases of unneeded strategic materials in neutral countries simply to keep them out of Axis hands. The revival of such practices would better enable us to combat barter agreements between the Soviet sphere and the states of the Middle East. Had we, for example, undertaken late in 1954 to buy up large quantities of Egyptian cotton, then overspilling the warehouses of the Delta, with part or all of our $32.5 million grant aid to Cairo, our cotton-state Congressmen in Washington would certainly have been outraged. But it might also have made the Soviet arms-forcotton deal appear a less attractive risk to the military junta in mid-1955. The one thing that makes no sense, however, is for the United States to heed every local domestic pressure and still expect to maintain our diplomatic position in a vital overseas area.

Of even greater importance, we have got to realize that while there may be arguable merit in extending unconditional economic or technical assistance to these countries—not for the sake of winning immediate friendships, but for the indirect benefits it may yield in the long run — there is absolutely no merit in unconditional diplomatic mediation when we are eager to win the favor of both parties to a dispute while preserving our own essential interests. Trading is the hallmark of politics, both domestic and international, and there is nothing ignoble about it. If we wanted Egypt to sign a bilateral military aid agreement with us, we should have made such an agreement the minimal price—paid for in advance — for the effective mediatory services we were glad to render. Whatever else they may be, American bilateral military aid agreements, even with the conditions laid down by Congress, may hardly be termed “imperialist,” and we should so have insisted in our negotiations with Egypt. As it was, American acquiescence in the estimate of Egypt’s leaders that hard bargaining on our part was a form of undue pressure tended to reaffirm them in their belief that there was something to their emotional accusat ions against “American imperialism.”

Another thing that has inhibited us in the search for a viable Middle East policy has been our failure to establish just what our vital interests in this area are. The policy pursued by Washington in recent years has, in effect, been guided by two antithetical propositions. The Middle East, according to the first, is indispensable to the Western world because of its oil, its bases, and its strategic location across the main communication routes linking Europe with Asia and Africa. The Middle East, according to the second proposition, is militarily indefensible against a possible Soviet attack. Therefore, we must avoid becoming too deeply involved militarily in this area.

This paradox made for an impossible equation in a Cold War context. Nevertheless, we failed to revise our thinking about the West’s interests in the Middle East, either by declaring them expendable and accepting the logical consequences that this entailed, or by striving resolutely to find some effective way of defending them. Instead, when we reached the unavoidable fork in the road we tried to put off the choice and simultaneously to pursue a policy of limited involvement and one of limited abandonment.

Our greatest mistake, however, has been our naïveté in thinking that we can entice Middle Easterners into liking us simply by giving or promising them lots of money or airplanes with no strings attached. This penchant of ours for engaging in popularity contests is one that we have displayed generally across the globe, but nowhere has it been more manifest than in our dealings with Middle Easterners. All we achieve by it is to persuade them that we are childish bargainers, fools begging to be hoodwinked like rich tourists visiting an Oriental bazaar. We must face the fact that lavish gifts will not win us friends among the Arabs, for whom we are tarred with the twin brush of close association with Britain and France and sympathy for Israel—however much the Arabs may exaggerate this last factor in their own minds.

In view of the past vagaries of our policy, the most we could probably have hoped for in the Middle East, and especially in the Arab world, was respect. This is something that we could have obtained, and will in the future be able to obtain, only through a tough, determined, and unequivocal attitude that makes clear to everyone in the Middle East, in NATO, and in the Soviet sphere, just where we stand and what we are prepared to do to defend our vital interests in the Arab world.