The mid-1950s were an especially active period of U.S. concern about Soviet influ-
ence in the Middle East. Anticommunist uprisings in Hungary and Poland during
1956, the crisis over the Suez Canal that same year, and Moscow’s successful launch
of a satellite, Sputnik,in 1957 heightened cold war tensions. In the Middle East,
Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser sought to play the two superpowers against one
another by demanding aid from both; his strategy reaped large amounts of military
aid from the Soviet Union but annoyed the United States, which provided only lim-
ited amounts of food assistance. Both superpowers came to Egypt’s aid during the Suez
crisis, using diplomatic pressure, including outright threats, to force Britain, France,
and Israel to back down in their attempt to seize the Suez Canal and oust Nasser from
power (The Suez Crisis, p. 80).
In response to the Suez crisis and broader concerns about possible Soviet inter-
vention in the Middle East, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles developed a broad
proposal for U.S. action to counter Moscow in the region. President Dwight D. Eisen-
hower presented the plan to a special joint session of Congress on January 5, 1957,
warning that the Soviet Union was intent on “dominating the Middle East” as part
of its grander scheme of “communizing the world.” Moscow had no legitimate eco-
nomic or other interests in the region, he said, noting for example that the Soviet
Union had its own ample reserves of oil and natural gas.
To counter Soviet expansionism, Eisenhower asked Congress for the authority to
provide economic and military aid, including military force if necessary, to support
any nation or group of nations in the Middle East threatened by “international com-
munism.” Significantly, Eisenhower told Congress that the use of military force by the
United States would be “subject to the overriding authority of the United Nations
Security Council in accordance with the [UN] Charter.” This was one of the few state-
ments by any U.S. president appearing to acknowledge that the United Nations had
any kind of veto power over the use of military force.
Members of both parties in Congress greeted Eisenhower’s proposal, which imme-
diately became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, with much skepticism. Some mem-
bers thought that the president had not made the case that the Soviet Union posed a
genuine threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East, and others said that the adminis-
tration had contributed to the Suez crisis by withholding aid that it earlier had prom-
ised for construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Despite these and other con-
cerns, Congress gave Eisenhower the authority he requested, adopting a joint resolution
on March 7 allowing for economic and military assistance to the Middle East. The
resolution also authorized the president to use U.S. armed forces in the region “if the
president determines the necessity” of doing so.
Eisenhower made use of the new authority slightly more than a year later when he
sent U.S. marines to Lebanon to bolster that country’s government, which (along with
Jordan) feared the consequences of a political union between Nasser’s Egypt and Syria.
The marines remained in Lebanon for about three months and accomplished Eisen-
hower’s goal of stabilizing the situation there. It was to be the first of several major U.S.
military interventions in the Middle East (U.S. Involvement in Lebanon, p. 339).
Following is the text of the address to a Joint Session of Congress delivered by Pres-
ident Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 5, 1957.ARABS AND ISRAELIS 87