Author: Yaqub-Salim-Clyde
Date: 1999
Institution: Yale-University (0265)
Subject:
History
Language: English
Abstract:In early 1957 U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a new U.S. policy for the Middle East known informally as the Eisenhower Doctrine. The Eisenhower Doctrine was expressed in a congressional resolution declaring the intention of the United States to offer increased economic and military aid to receptive Middle Eastern countries and to protect, with U.S. armed forces if necessary, the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations from “international communism.” With this congressional mandate, the United States for the first time took the lead in defending and promoting Western interests throughout the Middle East, a role it continued to play long after the Eisenhower Doctrine itself had been abandoned. Ostensibly, the Eisenhower Doctrine aimed at protecting the Middle East from Soviet encroachment, but it also sought to contain radical Arab nationalism, which the Eisenhower administration believed to be in league with Soviet expansionism. By offering economic aid, military aid, and more explicit guarantees of American protection, the Eisenhower administration hoped to convince a majority of Arab governments to side openly with the West in the Cold War, thus isolating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his regional supporters. Containing Nasserism, the administration believed, would decrease the likelihood that the oil-rich Middle East would ever fall under Soviet domination. The effort to contain Nasserism did not succeed, however, because the Eisenhower administration overestimated its own political strength in the Arab world while underestimating that of Nasserism. It was politically dangerous for Arab regimes to side with the West or to oppose Nasser, and nations taking either stand were invariably weakened. in late 1958 the United States gave up on organizing an openly pro-West coalition of Arab states and decided to seek an accommodation with Nasser. By early 1959 Nasser's relations with the Soviet Union had deteriorated, and Nasserism now seemed to be a potential barrier to, rather than an avenue of, Soviet penetration of the Middle East. The United States and Egypt enjoyed a modest rapprochement for the remainder of Eisenhower's term. SO: VOLUME 61-01A OF DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS INTERNATIONAL. PAGE 332 NO: AAI9954402