American Intervention in The Middle East - Egypt 1956: The Suez Crisis

Egypt 1956: The Suez Crisis

For more details on Egypt 1956, see The Suez Crisis.

Today ‘more than a quarter of the world’s oil are shipped through the Suez Canal’

Although accepting large sums of military aid from the United States in 1954, by 1956 Egyptian leader Nasser had grown tired of the American influence in the country. The involvement that the U.S. would take in Egyptian business and politics in return for aid, Nasser thought ‘smacked of colonialism’. Indeed, as political scholar B.M. Bleckman argued in 1978, that ‘Nasser had ambivalent feelings toward the United States. From 1952 to 1954 he was on close terms with U.S. officials and was viewed in Washington as a promising moderate Arab leader. The conclusion of an arms deal with the USSR in 1955, however, had coded the relationship between Cairo and Washington considerably, and the Dulles-Eisenhower decision to withdraw the offer to finance the Aswan High Dam in mid-1956 was a further blow to the chances of maintaining friendly ties. Eisenhower’s stand against the British, French, and Israeli attack on Egypt in October 1956 created a momentary sense of gratitude on the part of Nasser, but the subsequent development of the Eisenhower Doctrine, so clearly aimed at “containing” Nasserism, undermined what little goodwill existed toward the United States in Cairo’.‘The Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the demise of British power and its gradual replacement by USA as the dominant power in the Middle East.’ The Eisenhower Doctrine became a manifestation of this process. ‘The general objective of the Eisenhower Doctrine, like that of the Truman Doctrine formulated ten years earlier, was the containment of Soviet expansion.’ Furthermore, when the Doctrine was finalised on March 9, 1957, it ‘essentially gave the president the latitude to intervene militarily in the Middle East … without having to resort to Congress.’ indeed as, Middle East scholar Irene L. Gerdzier explains ‘that with the Eisenhower Doctrine the United States emerged “as the uncontested Western power…in the Middle East’

Meanwhile, in Jordan nationalistic anti-government rioting has broken out and the U.S. decides to send a battalion of Marines to Lebanon in case of possibly having to intervene in Jordan later that year. Moreover, attempting to keep the pro-American King Hussein of Jordan, pro-American and in power, the CIA starts to make secret payments of millions of dollars a year to King Hussein. In the same year, the U.S. supports allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia and sends fleets to be near Syria as Syria’s government has executed nationalistic and pro-Soviet policies the same year. However, 1958 is to become a difficult year in U.S. foreign policy; in 1958 Syria and Egypt are merged into the “United Arab Republic”, anti-American and anti-government revolts are occurring in Lebanon, causing the Lebanese president Chamoun to ask America for help, and the very pro-American King Feisal the 2nd of Iraq is overthrown by a group of nationalistic military officers. It was quite ‘commonly believed that …stirred up the unrest in Lebanon and, perhaps, had helped to plan the Iraqi revolution.’