Thursday 6 October 2016
Photo, left:
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents.
Hour One
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 1, Block A: Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law Schools; Hoover Institution; in re: Obamacare. http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacare-sustainable (1 of 4)
2015: http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacare-sustainable
2014: https://www.scribd.com/document/244162771/Hoover-Digest-2014-No-4-Fall#p...
2013 http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacares-death-spiral
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 1, Block B: Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law Schools; Hoover Institution; in re: Obamacare. http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacare-sustainable (2 of 4)
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 1, Block C: Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law Schools; Hoover Institution; in re: Obamacare. http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacare-sustainable (3 of 4)
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 1, Block D: Richard Epstein, Chicago and NYU Law Schools; Hoover Institution; in re: Obamacare. http://www.hoover.org/research/obamacare-sustainable (4 of 4)
Hour Two
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Omri Ceren, Israel Project, in re: Iran. Within the Iran deal is a secret deal of gifts to Iran. The sanctions regime is being dismantled and no one is criticizing the missile launches; and there’s discussion of large funds for ransom. After two months of investigations into 16 and 17 Jan in Geneva: McGuirk from the US. When Iran is about to get into negotiations, it takes hostages, so it had a number of hostages during the signing, with four whom Washington desperately wanted back. Three requisites:
- $1.7 bil cash
- Cut loose some unpleasant Iranian ops
- . . . . . .
The Administration refused to admit that there was cash for ransom. Even after the Wall Street Journal and others had revealed this clearly, the Obama Adm kept lying. Stunning.
Meanwhile, Iranians went on domestic TV and bragged about “putting the screws to the Americans.” Claimed that Americans told hem to hide these secret negotiations from everyone, the American people and the Europeans.
This was American being extorted by the Islamic republic. The consequences cannot be overestimates. The JCPOA: Sanctions against Bank Sapa were to continue for eight years, but the Obama Administration caved in.
Jay Solomon reported that Kerry has been trying to go to Teheran for over a decade; Obama desperately wanted to visit throughout his entire eight years yet and couldn't even get a meeting with the Iranian amb to the UN.
Reporters say that the Obama Adm was terrified of the optics were they not able to get the hostages back.
· http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/annie-fixler-washington-dismantles-the-ballistic-missile-embargo/
· http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-admin-secretly-facilitated-iranian-ballistic-missile-program/
· http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-admin-hiding-secret-hostage-docs-signed-iran-spymasters/
· http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/dubowitz-mark-obama-admin-gutted-iran-ballistic-missile-embargo/
· http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/emanuele-ottolenghi-how-the-nuke-deal-is-funding-irans-darkest-forces/
· http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/obama-admin-gutted-iran-ballistic-missile-embargo/article/2004703
Omri Ceren is the Managing Director for Press and Strategy at The Israel Project. He is a political operative and an academic who has been involved in politics and journalism for over a decade, with a focus on Israel and Iran issues. Ceren is a Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School.
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: Mike Doran*, Hudson Institute and author, Ike’s Gamble; in re: The Suez Crisis of 1956. In the Suez crisis, Dwight Eisenhower received and education about Israel. Compare then and now: both Eisenhower and Obama held that the US had got too close to Israel – esp Ike, who thought Israel was a strategic liability in order to court Arab nationalism, above all Egypt –not in the pocket of Brit imperialist or Zionists during the Cold War. At the end of his term, he reversed thinking, decided that Israel was a force for stability, and would stabilize Jordan. Parallel: Ike to Egypt and Obama to Iran.
Secret speech in Feb 1956: revealed Stalin’s cruelties. Cross-current, Hungarian uprising and he Middle East: de-Salinization speech helped Israel, which first got wind of it and passed it on to the West; also, Brits, French and Israelis attacked Egypt at the same time as _____________.
Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He specializes in Middle East security issues. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council, where he was responsible for helping to devise and coordinate United States strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to contain Iran and Syria. He also served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon. School. He received a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton. Before going to Hudson, Doran was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Malcolm just attended Shimon Peres’s funeral, chatted with Prince Charles. His paternal grandmother was Princess Alice of Battenburg, buried on ht Mount of Olives. She’s also honored at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile; she lived in Greece during the war, took in a Jewish family and hid them for thirteen months under Nazi rule. Also a Hero of the Holocaust; asked ot be buried in the courtyard f a small church on the Mount of Olives. Prophets, major rabbis, and leaders buried there; has been a major cemetery for thousands of years. Charles was charming, not pretentious, wore a yarmulke with a royal crest on it. He went from the funeral to the site, was much moved by the visit.
A Portuguese, Mr Gutteres, has just been elected new SG. In Portuguese introduced the bill to overturn the rules of the Inquisition courts. For 500 years, Jewish families secretly passed on traditions and small articles to children. Conversos. Hid a Torah scroll in the wall of a house. Someone recently doing construction found it, gently wrapped it, took it to experts, and it was authenticated . Next to a XVI C church. It's thirty feet long. THIs sort of antiquity may be all across Portugal. Pastor Hagee’s wife dug in a garden in Mexico, found a Bibie; another example of a religion that never destroys its holy books but buries them. This is the 75th anniversary of Babi Yar where tens of thousands of Jews and others were slaughtered by . . .
Archbishop of Canterbury: a Methodist church had an anti-Israel display; he obliged the to add an explanation of why the Israeli checkpoints are far from inhumane but a careful examination of persons passing through.
Sunnis suddenly afraid of the end of ISIS because it seems to represent a force against the absolute hegemony of Iran, which urgently wants a corridor form Iran to the Mediterranean; treasure and fortune in Syria; made a stooge of the Baghdad govt, intimidate the Kurds, see themselves as ____; control four Arab capitals. Moving into the Jazeera and the Horn of Africa. Iraq expelled the Saudi ambassador!
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: James Jeffrey, Washington Institute, in re: Turkey. The NSC is offering options to Pres Obama? What can the US do to intervene in Idlib Province without risking confrontation with Russia? Only way I can think of is mil confrontation with Russia.
Everyone in the Middle East is asking, Where’s the US? Erdogan sees Assad as an existential danger.
His internal situation: support for him increased after the attempted coup. Yes, because the coup-plotters are seen as farther into Islamism than anyone.
Also Gulen, who’s much feared even by people who loathe Erdogan. A month ago, the oppo leaders said that those who were arrested (not those merely removed from jobs) were unquestionably part of the coup . . .
· http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/americas-anxious-allies-trip-report-from-saudi-arabia-turkey-and-israel
· http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/erdogan-faces-a-choice-between-popularity-and-power
· http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/turkeys-rewarming-ties-with-iran
· http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/dr-aykan-erdemir-an-opening-for-erdogan-to-shift-turkeys-course/
Ambassador James F. Jeffrey is the Philip Solondz distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute where he focuses on U.S. diplomatic and military strategy in the Middle East, with emphasis on Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. One of the nation's most senior diplomats, Ambassador Jeffrey has held a series of highly sensitive posts in Washington, D.C., and abroad. In addition to his service as ambassador in Ankara and Baghdad, he served as assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration, with a special focus on Iran. He previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the Department of State, where his responsibilities included leading the Iran policy team and coordinating public diplomacy. Earlier appointments included service as senior advisor on Iraq to the secretary of state; chargé d'affaires and deputy chief of mission in Baghdad; deputy chief of mission in Ankara; and ambassador to Albania. A former infantry officer in the U.S. army, Ambassador Jeffrey served in Germany and Vietnam from 1969 to 1976.
Hour Three
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 3, Block A: Farzin Nadimi, geopolitical researcher and analyst in re: Iranian drones (UAVs) & missiles.
· http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/iran-shows-off-its-bounty-of-crashed-drones-and-new-uavs
· http://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-says-it-has-built-attack-drone-based-on-captured-u-s-craft-1475333429
· https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/10/05/iranian-official-we-have-warehouses-full-of-missiles-that-can-flatten-tel-aviv/
Dr Farzin Nadimi is a Washington-based researcher and analyst specializing in the military and geopolitical affairs of Iran and the Persian Gulf region in both current and historical terms. He has previously written regarding Iran’s asymmetric naval strategy, defense industries and military history. He has a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Manchester, and an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London.
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 3, Block B: Anna Borshchevskaya, Washington Institute, in re: Russia. If Russia sees missile inbound in Syria will assume they're aimed vs Russian soldiers and will retaliate. Days of war-preparations in Moscow, and war drums beating.
Obama has emboldened Putting for along time; Putin spoke to the Duma recently on strengthening Russian defense. Feckless US policy. . . .Putin trying to take full advantage of the pre-election moment in the US; assumes that everything is frozen till November. Hopes Trump will win. In any case trying to undermine American democracy, mocks the validity of he system. Were Mrs Clinton to win, what would Mr Putin say when he calls to congratulate? More toward a the new cold war in rhetoric. In any case, Syria will be ever more of a mess; hope Clinton wd enforce a no-fly-zone in Syria.
To enforce a no-fly zone would require going to war with Russia, yes? I don’t agree. However, current situation is fragile and unstable. Every day there’s a risk of clash with Russia. I think Russia is afraid that the US wil target Assad; “any action in Syria will mean going to war with Russia.” Are they scared in Moscow?
· http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37557138
· https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2016/10/04/obama-administration-considering-strikes-on-assad-again/
· http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/world/middleeast/syria-russia-us-election.html?_r=0
· http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/world/europe/john-kerry-russia-syria.html?_r=0
· http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-adds-hundreds-warheads-nuclear-treaty/
· http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/world/middleeast/us-suspends-talks-with-russia-on-syria.html
Anna Borshchevskaya is the Ira Weiner Fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on Russia's policy toward the Middle East. In addition, she is a fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy and was previously with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Atlantic Council. A former analyst for a U.S. military contractor in Afghanistan, she has also served as communications director at the American Islamic Congress Originally from Moscow, Ms. Borshchevskaya came to the United States as a refugee in 1993 and has since received an M.A. in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in political science and international relations from the State University of New York at Geneseo.
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 3, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Blue Origin A-OK!
Success for New Shepard launch abort test
The competition heats up: Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule not only successfully rocketed away from its propulsion module and landed safely, the propulsion module unexpectedly survived today’ launch abort test and landed vertically as well.
This was the fifth flight of the propulsion module, which with the capsule will now be retired and placed on display.
Below the fold is the video of the entire test flight, including countdown and several long holds. The actual launch is at 1:06:19.
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/success-for-new-shepard-launch-abort-test/ (1 of 2)
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 3, Block D: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black; (2 of 2)
Hour Four
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 by Norman Polmar and Edward Whitman (1 of 4)
“Hunters and Killers is the first comprehensive history of all aspects of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) from its beginnings in the 18th century through the important role of present anti-submarine systems and operations. Published in two volumes, the work discusses anti-submarine warfare operations in World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and today. In addition to tactical and strategic narratives of major ASW campaigns, the work covers the evolution of ASW sensors, weapons, platforms, and tactics.
This first volume looks at the often ignored reaction to the earliest submersible attack on British warships in 1776 to the first, primitive ASW actions of World War I. World War I saw the Germans use U-boats to devastate British shipping, nearly driving the country out of the war. Here the authors look at the development of the innovative, but rudimentary sensors and weapons that the Allies used to counter the U-boat threats in the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters.
Still, the U-boats were never completely defeated in the Great War, and the ensuing chapters about the two decades between the world wars narrate the development of sonar, radar, and ASW ships, as well as changing political attitudes toward undersea warfare.
The remainder of the first volume covers the first half of World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic, from September 1939 to the U-boat crisis in the spring of 1943. This section discusses the influence of intelligence, gained mainly through cryptography, on the Battle of the Atlantic.
Polmar and Whitman have created a thorough, well-researched reference for anyone interested in the development of ASW.”
https://www.amazon.com/Hunters-Killers-Anti-Submarine-Warfare-1776/dp/15...
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 by Norman Polmar and Edward Whitman (2 of 4)
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 by Norman Polmar and Edward Whitman (3 of 4)
Thursday 6 October 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 by Norman Polmar and Edward Whitman (4 of 4)
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* When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president of the United States in 1953, Great
Britain was facing a crisis in the Arab Middle East. Although it had formally given up
much of its empire (as well as its mandate in Palestine), Britain still exercised a great deal
of influence through outright protectorates like the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, friendly
monarchies like Jordan and Iraq, and a network of military bases. But the linchpin of the
system was Egypt, where the United Kingdom had 80,000 troops stationed along the
Suez Canal—and Egypt was in danger. King Faruq, the obliging ruler over a British
protectorate, had recently been overthrown, and the nationalist military men who had
seized power, known as the Free Officers, were publicly demanding that London
evacuate its forces from the country.
What stance would the new American president take toward the crisis in Egypt and
toward the rest of the Middle East? In general, Eisenhower believed that America’s task
was to be an honest broker between the British and the new Arab nationalists seeking
redress from their former overlords. In no way idiosyncratic, Ike’s view of the American
role was by far the dominant perspective in Washington—a perspective reinforced by the
foreign-policy elite’s stance toward Israel, which at best could be described as arm’s-
length if not positively adverse.
Indeed, the two postures went together. Like Britain, Israel was a country inextricably
linked to the United States but regarded by the Arabs with deep hostility. Since the goal
of American policy was to acquire as much Arab goodwill as possible by demonstrating,
in the terminology of the administration, “impartiality,” it was necessary to avoid any
stigma of association with the Jewish state. This chilly attitude expressed itself, among
other ways, in the flowering under the Eisenhower administration of the American
Friends of the Middle East (AFME), a CIA front organization one of whose aims was to
counteract the support for Zionism in domestic American politics.
It is impossible to exaggerate the impact that the image of America as an honest broker
had on Eisenhower’s thought. The notion that the top priority of the United States was to
win the friendship and gain the confidence of Arab nationalists by helping them extract
concessions from Britain and Israel not only preempted other views but shaped policy
proposals up and down the line. So pervasive was the idea that Eisenhower and his
colleagues regarded it not as an intellectual construct but as a description of reality itself.
It was not open to debate.
As for the new regime in Egypt in particular, here the United States entertained very large
hopes indeed. Although outwardly the reins of power in Cairo were held by General
Muhammad Naguib, the country’s first president, it soon emerged that the true leader of
the Free Officers was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who also cut a charismatic figure in
the wider Arab world. In keeping with the honest-broker approach, Eisenhower identified
Nasser as nothing less than a strategic partner: the only leader capable of ushering in a
new era of cooperation between all of the Arabs and the West.
With this in mind, Eisenhower helped Nasser oust the British from Egypt. While doing
so, he also allowed the CIA to equip Nasser with a powerful, state-of- the-art broadcasting
system, in the expectation that he would use this equipment to help unify the Arabs
behind the United States in the cold-war struggle with the Soviet Union. But this was a
gigantic miscalculation. Soon the broadcasting system was beaming Nasser’s radical pan-
Arab ideology, in all its anti-Western and anti-Zionist glory, into every Arab household
in the Middle East. In the end, gravitating not toward Washington but toward Moscow,
Nasser worked assiduously to undermine the Western position in the Middle East.
What went wrong? Accounts differ on the precise cause of Nasser's alienation. In some
versions, a ham-fisted America undermines itself. In others, a belligerent Israel drives
Egypt into the arms of the Soviet Union. In still others, both factors conspire together.
But a major theme runs through much of the vast literature on this subject. Eisenhower
and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, came into office, so the tale goes, with the
right ideas and good intentions, but in the course of events they willy-nilly adopted the
3
old attitudes and habits of empire. Against their better instincts, they alienated Nasser
and, along with him, much of the rest of the Arab world; by the time they realized their
mistake, it was already too late.
The real story is quite different. Imbued with their honest-broker mentality, Eisenhower
and Dulles subordinated all other issues to the effort to settle the Anglo-Egyptian and
Arab-Israeli conflicts. This, for them, would eliminate the obstacles to an American
strategic partnership with the Arabs. In sedulously cleaving to this approach, they turned
a blind eye to the fierce, ongoing conflicts among the regional Muslim powers
themselves and to Egypt’s hegemonic aspirations. Exploiting the American fixation on
peacemaking, Nasser adroitly deflected Washington’s attention from his own
revolutionary, pan-Arab program, which, even as it screamed about Zionism and
imperialism, sought to eliminate Arab rivals to his regional leadership.
What finally brought home to Eisenhower the deficiencies of his honest-broker approach
was the long-term impact of the Suez Crisis.
The crisis came to a head in late 1956 when Britain, France, and Israel jointly attacked
Egypt in an effort to regain Western control of the Suez Canal, which Nasser had
nationalized. Taking a strong position against the three nations, Eisenhower went so far,
in the United Nations, as to side with the Soviet Union against America’s allies. By
publicly demonstrating his firm opposition to the European and Israeli action, the
president expected to reap a large strategic payoff for the United States in the form of
widespread Arab goodwill. Instead, Washington handed Nasser yet another political
victory—the greatest of his career—thereby helping to transform the Egyptian leader into
a pan-Arab hero of epic proportions.
The consequences for the United States would be profound. When Eisenhower first took
office in 1953, the Arab world was still tied to the West, thanks in no small measure to
the continued influence of British and French imperialism. The Soviet Union had been
successfully locked out of the region for almost three decades, and the American goal
was to keep it out. By the end of his second term, however, a wave of revolution had
swept the region. It did its greatest damage in Iraq, where revolutionaries, modeling
themselves on Nasser, toppled the pro-British Hashemite monarchy. The new leaders
quickly looked to Moscow for support, and the Middle East became a major arena of
cold-war competition.
Watching these results unfold in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Eisenhower would
reverse course, discarding, once and for all, his fundamental assumptions about the
Middle East. No longer did he believe, as during the Suez Crisis, that helping the Arabs
balance the power of the Israelis and the Europeans was the key to a successful regional
strategy. In fact, he dispensed altogether with the notion of any one-size- fits-all policy
toward the Arabs. The key challenge before the United States, he now realized, was to
manage inter-Arab conflict by helping one network of Arab states balance the power of a
rival network. In later life, he expressed regret for having treated his allies so harshly at
Suez, and even came to see Israel as a strategic asset.
“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said. In
20th-century Middle Eastern history, no period rhymes more powerfully with our present
moment than does the Eisenhower era. Today, as then, we are witnessing the fall of a
discredited old order and the rise of something new. Transnational Islamist movements
are shaking the region in a manner similar to Nasser’s pan-Arabism. Where Nasser had
Radio Cairo to spread his message, today's revolutionaries have Facebook and Twitter.
To be sure, there are also big differences. Vladimir Putin's Russia is a thorn in the side of
the United States today, but it does not pose so grave a threat as did the Soviet Union.
Nor is there a contemporary Arab figure analogous to Nasser. The role played by Egypt
in the international system of the 1950s does bear some resemblance to that played today
by Iran, but the differences are almost as great as the similarities.
5
Nevertheless, many of the key questions that plagued Eisenhower continue to challenge
us today as the Obama presidency nears its end. Should Washington make policy toward
Arab and Muslim regimes and publics collectively, or should it focus on the narrow
interests of specific elites? Is Israel a liability or an asset? In a region so riven with
conflict, how much support does America owe its allies? Indeed, what criteria should the
United States use to distinguish between allies and enemies?
The story of Eisenhower's relations with Nasser offers a sober lesson in the dangers of
calibrating that last distinction incorrectly and then stubbornly sticking to one’s erroneous
analysis. That was not Eisenhower’s way. The first American president to formulate a
comprehensive strategy for the Middle East, he was also one of the most sophisticated
and experienced practitioners of international politics ever to reside in the White House.
Thanks to his military experience, he was accustomed to reviewing his actions and
assessing their effectiveness; when he made mistakes, he paused, thought deeply about
them, and adjusted course as necessary. The hard lessons he learned from the Suez Crisis,
and then acted upon, have an enduring quality. They may not provide us with a detailed
route out of the Middle Eastern labyrinth today, but they can certainly make us wiser
about how to negotiate it.
.. .. ..
In IKE’S GAMBLE: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East (Simon & Schuster;
October 11, 2016), historian and former White House advisor Michael Doran delivers a
major retelling of the Suez Crisis of 1956, one of the most significant events in the history of US
policy in the Middle East—revealing how President Eisenhower came to recognize that Israel,
not Egypt, would be America’s most important ally in the Middle East. Understanding this
history and the major players that were involved is particularly relevant, with this Fall marking
the 60th anniversary since the Suez Crisis. Doran explains how Eisenhower’s handling of the
Suez Crisis offers important lessons about the Middle East today, and shows that “The lessons
[Eisenhower] learned from the Suez Crisis were weighty, and they have an enduring quality.
They may not provide us with a detailed route out of the Middle Eastern labyrinth today, but
they will certainly make us wiser about how to negotiate it” (p.13).
Drawing on government documents, diaries, memoirs, and other primary sources, Doran
provides a salient portrait of President Eisenhower and the conflict he faced in this tumultuous
time. He argues that Eisenhower saw the role of the United States in the Middle East as that of
an “honest broker,” “a mediator helping nationalists seek fair redress from the British” (p.9).
This book examines the influence of the honest broker paradigm on American relations with
the Arab world. It is the tale of Frankenstein’s monster, with the United States as the mad
scientist and the new regime in Egypt as his uncontrollable creation.
The story of the Suez Crisis begins in the 1950s, when nationalist fervor was sweeping the
Middle East as the region’s colonial powers, Britain and France, were too weakened by World
War II to exercise the same degree of dominance as before. To prevent the Soviet Union from
exploiting this situation, President Eisenhower aligned himself with Egypt’s young and
charismatic leader, President Gamal Nasser. The Americans believed that Egypt, the largest and
most influential country in the region, was the key to delivering the Arab world to the West in
the Cold War. However, Nasser proved to be duplicitous, appealing to America’s discomfort
with European colonialism to create conflict between Eisenhower and UK prime ministers,
Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. Though the US and the UK had a historically “special
relationship” based on mutual respect and benefit, Doran writes that “the very love of liberty
that Eisenhower celebrated…made it impossible for him to accept the idea of forging a common
Anglo-American front in the Middle East” (p.8).
Eisenhower learned the deficiencies of the “honest broker approach.” Nasser had convinced
Eisenhower that he was loyal to the West, when really he was playing the US to serve his own
vision of the future of the Middle East. Eisenhower believed that in aligning himself with
Nasser and helping him oust the British from Egypt, he had laid the foundation for an Arab-
Western alliance in the Cold War. Eisenhower even allowed the CIA to equip Nasser with a
powerful, state-of- the-art broadcasting system, which he believed would be used to rally the
Arabs behind the US. Instead, Nasser made a weapons deal with the USSR and began
destabilizing other Arab countries that the US had been courting to make himself “a pan-Arab
hero of epic proportions” (p.12), using the powerful equipment Eisenhower outfitted him with
to beam his “radical pan-Arab ideology, in all its anti-Western and anti-Zionist glory, into every
household”(p.11).
In 1956, Nasser moved to seize control of the Suez Canal from the West, thereby bringing the
Middle East to the brink of war. When the British and the French, who operated the canal,
joined with Israel to take the canal by force, Eisenhower intervened to stop the invasion and
win back the trust of the Arab world, which he feared might start uniting against America.
In IKE’S GAMBLE, Doran revises the conventional understanding of Eisenhower as the most
historically “anti-Israel” president. Initially, Doran writes, “the strategic goal of American policy
was to reclaim as much Arab goodwill as possible by demonstrating, in the terminology of the
Eisenhower administration, ‘impartiality’—a word that implied tacking away from Israel”
(p.10). In the end, Eisenhower came to see that Nasser had deceived him, that the Arab
countries were too fractious to serve as America’s central ally in the Middle East, and that the
US should instead turn to Israel.
IKE’S GAMBLE is a finely researched, unconventional account of America’s role in the Suez
Crisis. A foremost expert on national foreign policy, Michael Doran writes particularly
perceptively about the Middle East, as he demonstrated in his previous book, Pan-Arabism
Before Nasser. Affording deep insight into Eisenhower and his foreign policy, this fascinating
and provocative history provides a rich new understanding of how the US became the power
broker in the Middle East.
It was President Eisenhower who brought the United States to a position of unrivaled
dominance in the Middle East. As he did so, he supplanted Britain and France and
contended with questions that still bedevil American leaders today. Is Israel a liability
or an asset? Who are America’s friends in the Middle East, who are its enemies, and
how can we tell them apart? What is the best method to contain rival great powers,
such as the Soviet Union?
Ike’s Gamble is a work of history but it has valuable lessons for us today. Many of the
problems that we now face in the Middle East were already present in the Suez Crisis.
Ike’s Gamble offers a new interpretation of the Crisis, one of the most dramatic events
of the Cold War, but it also traces the evolution of Eisenhower’s thinking as his initial,
erroneous ideas about the region came into contact with a harsh reality.
Ike’s Gamble is the story of Frankenstein’s monster. The gamble of the title was on
Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic young Egyptian leader. Betting that Egypt
would become a pillar of support for the West in the Cold War, Eisenhower embarked
on a plan to help Nasser to expel British troops from his country – in 1954, before the
Suez Crisis. Once Nasser ousted the British, he no longer had need for close relations with
America, and he gravitated into the Soviet orbit.
While showing how Nasser manipulated Ike, the book also highlights the
Shakespearean conflicts between him and two British prime ministers, Winston
Churchill and Anthony Eden. Previous histories have ignored the contentious relations
between Eisenhower and Churchill in 1953-55. In public the two leaders pretended to
be great friends, but behind the scenes they were at loggerheads over Egypt.
Despite Eisenhower’s advocacy for Egypt, Nasser gravitated into the orbit of the Soviet
Union, launched a border war against Israel, and conducted a massive campaign of
subversion against the British and French positions in the Arab world. After Nasser
nationalized the Suez Canal, Israel, Britain and France launched a coordinated attack
against Egypt. Eisenhower, who was surprised by the move, acted decisively to stop the
attack and to force his allies to withdraw, even though doing so required him to work in
parallel with the Soviet Union. The policy handed Gamal Abdel Nasser yet another
political victory, the greatest of his career, catapulting him to mythic heights in Arab
politics.
Whereas historians tend to regard Eisenhower’s management of the crisis as his finest
moment, Ike’s Gamble shows that Ike came to realize not only that he had been conned
by Nasser but that his basic ideas about the Middle East had been all wrong. The Arab
nations were too fractious to anchor America’s Middle East policy.
By the time he had recognized his mistake, however, Egypt’s operation of the Suez Canal
was irreversible. But it was not too late to rethink the place of Israel in American policy.
When Eisenhower first came into office, he had regarded the Jewish State as a strategic
liability, a burden that undermined American credibility with the Arabs. By the time he
left, he saw it as an asset. The warming in American-Israeli relations that historians
usually attribute to President Kennedy actually began in the later Eisenhower years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Doran has served as a Middle East advisor in the White House and as a deputy
assistant Secretary of Defense. An alumnus of Stanford and Princeton Universities, he’s held
several academic positions and is a senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he specializes
in Middle East security issues. He lives in Washington, DC.