752 Chapter 28 Collision Courses, Abroad and at Home: 1946–1960
States granted independence in 1947), Thailand, and
Pakistan—joined this alliance.^4
Israel and the Middle East
Truman and Eisenhower had intervened in the Far
East because of a direct communist threat. But as the
American love affair with cars turned into an obses-
sion, United States policymakers became increasingly
attentive to the Middle East, where seas of oil had
been recently discovered. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and
Saudi Arabia sat upon nearly 60 percent of the
world’s known reserves.
After World War II, Zionists, who had long
sought to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine,
intensified their efforts. The slaughter of six million
European Jews by the Nazis strengthened Jewish
claims to a homeland and intensified pressure to
allow hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to
immigrate to Palestine, which was governed by Great
Britain according to a League of Nations mandate.
But the influx of Jewish settlers, and their calls for
creation of a Jewish state (Israel), provoked
Palestinian and Arab leaders. Fighting broke out.
President Truman angered Arab leaders by endorsing
the partition of the region into an Israeli and a
Palestinian state. In 1947, the United Nations voted
for partition and on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel
was established. Within hours, Truman recognized
its sovereignty.
Then Arab armies from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq,
Syria, and Lebanon attacked Israel. Although badly
outnumbered, the Israelis were better organized and
better armed than the Arabs and drove them off with
relative ease. Nearly a million local Arabs were dis-
placed, causing a desperate refugee problem in
nearby countries.
President Truman had consistently placed sup-
port for Israel before other considerations in the
Middle East, partly because of the conviction that
survivors of the Nazi holocaust were entitled to a
country of their own and partly because of the politi-
cal importance of the Jewish vote in the United
States. Dulles and Eisenhower tried to restore balance
and mollify the Arabs by deemphasizing American
support of Israel. Gas-hungry Americans could ill
afford to alienate the Arab world.
In 1952 a revolution in Egypt overthrew the dis-
solute King Farouk. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser
emerged as the strongman of Egypt. The United
States was prepared to lend Nasser money to build a
huge dam on the Nile at Aswan that would provide
irrigation and electric power for much of the region.
However, Eisenhower would not sell Egypt arms, but
the communists would.
For this reason Nasser drifted toward the com-
munist orbit. When Eisenhower then decided not to
finance the Aswan Dam, Nasser responded by nation-
alizing the Suez Canal. This move galvanized the
British and French. In conjunction with the French,
and without consulting the United States, the British
in 1956 decided to take back the canal by force. The
Israelis, alarmed by repeated Arab hit-and-run raids,
also attacked Egypt.
Events moved swiftly. Israeli armored columns
crushed the Egyptian army in the Sinai Peninsula in a
matter of days. France and Britain occupied Port
Said at the northern end of the canal. Nasser sank
ships to block the channel. In the UN the Soviet
Union and the United States introduced resolutions
calling for a cease-fire. Both were vetoed by Britain
and France.
Then the Soviet Union threatened to send “vol-
unteers” to help defend Egypt and launch atomic
missiles against France and Great Britain if they did
not withdraw. Eisenhower also demanded that the
invaders pull out of Egypt. In London large crowds
demonstrated against their own government. On
November 6, only nine days after the first Israeli units
had invaded Egypt, Prime Minister Anthony Eden,
haggard and shaken, announced a cease-fire. Israel
withdrew its troops. The crisis subsided as rapidly as it
had arisen.
The United States had won a measure of respect
in the Arab countries, but at what cost? Its major
allies had been humiliated. Their ill-timed attack had
enabled the Soviet Union to recover much of the
prestige it had lost as a result of its brutal suppression
of a Hungarian revolt that had broken out a week
before the Suez fiasco.
When the Soviet Union seemed likely to profit
from its “defense” of Egypt in the crisis, the president
announced the Eisenhower Doctrine (January 1957),
which stated that the United States was “prepared to
use armed force” anywhere in the Middle East against
“aggression from any country controlled by interna-
tional communism.” In practice, the Eisenhower
Doctrine amounted to little more than a restatement
of the containment policy.Eisenhower and Khrushchev
In 1956 Eisenhower was reelected, defeating Adlai
Stevenson even more decisively than he had in 1952.
Despite evident satisfaction with their leader, how-
ever, the American people were in a sober mood.(^4) The other signatories were Great Britain, France, the United
States, Australia, and New Zealand.