With the 2016 Iowa caucuses now behind us, and the New Hampshire primary election set for next week, we at the Mideast Memo are reminded of another U.S. presidential election 60 years ago.
Incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower, hobbled by a severe heart attack just months prior, was slow in the early winter weeks of 1956 to declare his intentions to run for re-election. A popular president presiding over a strong economy and a post-Korean War peace, the World War II hero had the luxury of waiting. When he did finally enter the fray, Ike had little trouble dispatching his party rivals in New Hampshire later that year, winning more than 94 percent of the vote.
Elections would be the least of Eisenhower's troubles in 1956, however. Amid an ever-evolving Cold War against the communist Soviet Union, the United States found itself increasingly at odds with various nationalist movements that had developed in the post-colonial Arab world. That May, the Egyptian government, led by firebrand premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, would be the first Arab country to recognize communist China. Eisenhower's Democratic critics -- among them former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt -- pounced on these developments, and chastised the president for insufficiently supporting the young state of Israel, which found itself surrounded by hostile and increasingly unstable Arab regimes.
Eisenhower, however, saw the region through a different lens. A devout anti-communist, the 34th president worried that an uneven hand in the Middle East would tarnish the United States' relatively objective image among Arab countries, as compared to colonial powers France and Great Britain. Ike, according to historian David A. Nichols, viewed friendship with the Arabs as vital, and feared that overt favoritism for Israel might push the "uncommitted and underdeveloped nations" of the region toward the Kremlin's open arms.
This delicate balancing act appeared ready to teeter over in July, when Colonel Nasser, now Egypt's president, seized and nationalized the vital Suez Canal shipping route. The move outraged Britain and France, both of which had a vital interest in the waterway and in the company that had administered it.
Israel's decision to invade Egypt with British and French support -- just a week before that fall's U.S. presidential election -- left Ike dumbfounded. Eisenhower -- whose administration had been working behind the scenes to reach a settlement to the Suez dispute -- censured the U.S. allies, and threatened sanctions against Israel, a move some argue the president would come to regret later in life.
Regardless, the tactic worked, and Eisenhower was able to pressure the British and French into accepting a U.N.-sponsored cease-fire on Nov. 6 -- the same day the president was overwhelmingly re-elected by the American people.
Eisenhower's actions came with a price, however. His efforts to prevent Britain and France from bullying a rising Arab power exposed the limitations of the region's onetime colonial masters, and, by default, made quite clear that the United States was now the region's decisive external power.
In a speech delivered the following January before a joint session of Congress, the president argued that it was in the United States' interest to arm and support the newly independent nations of the Middle East; countries recently freed from the yoke of colonialism, but not advanced or developed enough to fend off by themselves the perceived advances of international communism. Now referred to as the Eisenhower Doctrine, the policies proposed by the president that day would lay the foundation for decades of U.S. foreign policy.
"In the Eisenhower Doctrine, the president committed the United States to replacing Britain as the guarantor of stability and security in the Middle East. That obligation remains the cornerstone of American policy," argues Nichols, whose 2012 book "Eisenhower 1956" takes a comprehensive look at the effect the Suez crisis had on U.S. policy in the region. Future administrations would put their own spin on this doctrine, but whether the threat was Soviet communism or weaponized oil, the end result was roughly the same: The United States would continue to arm and prop up predominantly undemocratic Mideast governments in return for stability and security cooperation.
That the United States has more or less preserved this outmoded approach toward the region might strike more than a few curious observers as odd, since the Cold War ended decades ago, and the Soviet Union is long gone. The reality, of course, is that the status quo can be difficult to upend, and the United States has, over the years, developed genuine and often useful relationships with authoritarian governments such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, to name only a few.
"There is no great-power rival to organize U.S. strategy. Containing Soviet influence was the overriding goal during the Cold War, and the clarity of that objective made it easier to set priorities and sustain consistent policies," writes political scientist Stephen Walt. "Today, by contrast, there is no single overarching threat to the region and thus no clear organizing principle to guide U.S. policymakers."
Although his own view of the Middle East was, at times, far too myopic -- Eisenhower apparently referred to Iran's Zagros Mountains as the "first line of defense" against the Russians -- it is worth remember what was truly admirable about Ike's thinking on Arab sovereignty and security. Though his administration often failed to match deeds with words, and its efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, to oust undesirable rulers from capitals across the region would carry negative consequences for years to come, Eisenhower began a conversation about independence and plurality in the Middle East that we have yet to finish all these years later. Eisenhower:
"If the Middle East is to continue its geographic role of uniting rather than separating East and West; if its vast economic resources are to serve the well-being of the peoples there, as well as that of others; and if its cultures and religions and their shrines are to be preserved for the uplifting of the spirits of the peoples, then the United States must make more evident its willingness to support the independence of the freedom-loving nations of the area."
President Eisenhower was widely popular, and Americans had little reason in those early days of the Vietnam War to question the general's motives and judgement on foreign affairs. But as the bloody civil war in Syria enters its sixth year, and sectarian strife rages across much of the region, it is time for the United States to reassess a policy that has long outlived its usefulness.
"Above all, Eisenhower embraced the tides of history. He pressed America's allies to bury the corpse of colonialism in the Middle East," writes Nichols. "Today, we need the equivalent -- a rigorously defined, clear-headed commitment to democratic movements."
More on this:
Eisenhower 1956: The President's Year of Crisis
On Foreign Policy, Why Barack Is Like Ike -- Time
Is Obama Really Like Eisenhower? -- Brookings Institution
Suez and the Lessons of History -- The National Interest
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