What is the proper balance between firmness and flexibility for U.S. policymakers when dealing with Middle Eastern politics? To what extent does history offer guidelines? The Washington Postâ??s David Ignatius has reported that Chuck Hagel, nominated to be the next secretary of defense, has given President Obama and others copies of Eisenhower 1956, a book by David A. Nichols about the Suez Crisis of that year, and has endorsed the thirty-fourth presidentâ??s hard line against Israel.
It appears that Hagel sees Eisenhowerâ??s demand that Israel leave the Sinai Peninsula, which it captured in a one-hundred-hour campaign in late October and November of 1956, as an explicit model for future relations, where American demands for Israeli withdrawals will be acceded to, if Israel knows whatâ??s good for it. But 1956 was about more than Israel in the Sinai. These offer more useful lessons for policymakers.
The brief and ill-conceived campaign of Israel, Britain and France to capture Sinai and the Suez Canal grew in part out of American policy failures. Since the late 1940s, Americaâ??s primary goals in the region were to halt the spread of Communism and Soviet influence, maintain the flow of oil from friendly regimes, and to manage the Arab-Israeli relationship. By the end of that decade the oil still flowed, but the rest was in tatters.
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