Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Since the Second World War and post-war decolonization, the Middle East has been a consistent source of consternation for American foreign policymakers. Following the Suez Crisis of 1956, the United Kingdom could no longer be counted on to influence the region, creating a veritable vacuum of power that the United States sought to fill. In Containing Arab Nationalism, Salim Yaqub offers a detailed political history on U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East between 1956 and 1958—positioning the Eisenhower Doctrine as an essential turning point in U.S. relations with Middle Eastern nations. Yaqub, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara is a specialist in U.S. foreign relations with the Middle East during the Cold War. Through this book Yaqub has provided one of the first comprehensive treatments of the Eisenhower Doctrine and internal Middle Eastern diplomacy in the late 1950s.
The book’s primary theme is that following the 1956 crisis in Suez, the United States felt the need to fulfill the role of regional power balancer previously held by Britain. The Eisenhower doctrine, according to Yaqub, was a direct result of the Suez Crisis. Eisenhower’s middle east doctrine, as espoused in January 1957, pledged the United States to assist any Middle Eastern nation that was threatened by communism—an idea that would have lasting consequences well after Eisenhower’s term ended. With British influence in the Middle East waning, Yaqub argues that the Eisenhower administration saw a need to become more active in the region. The United States thought this was especially important in a Cold War characterized by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. competing for influence in distant regions of the global south. Regardless, the United States wanted to prevent Soviet influence and saw left-leaning Arab nationalist states like Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Syria as the most likely avenues for the Soviet Union to gain influence. Under the guise of a broader Cold War containment strategy, doing so in the Middle East required containing Arab nationalism, as the title suggests. Yaqub shows that the United States saw containing Arab nationalism as part and parcel of preventing Communist expansion in the region. In keeping with stated containment ideals, Eisenhower believed that offering aid and protection to Nasser’s rivals would convince most Middle East to side with the West. This strategy was designed to isolate Nasser. Instead, it had the opposite effect and was abandoned within three years.
To contain the Soviet Union and protect the Middle East from Communist domination, the United States began strengthening pro-Western conservative Arab regimes to isolate Nasser and his allies in the region. This strategy lasted until 1958 when the Eisenhower administration decided that Nasserism—this Arab nationalism—was too powerful to try and contain. According to Yaqub, the administration’s plan was fatally flawed from the start. Washington overestimated the public relations bounce that the United States received from the Suez Crisis. Whereas Eisenhower and Dulles believed they might be seen as a benevolent superpower compared to Soviet aggressors and would hold the moral high ground. In reality, Nasser and other Arab states could have cared less. The Eisenhower doctrine fails because Eisenhower and Dulles overestimated American political capital. Yaqub describes the inter-workings of Arab regional politics, displaying how Nasser and the competing conservative regimes played the Soviets and Americans off each other for their mutual benefit. Despite American worries about Nasser and the Soviets, by the end of the decade, Nasser and the U.S.S.R. were already feuding, despite the Eisenhower administration’s grandiose notions of Soviet influence dominating the region.
Yaqub also offers analysis on the relationship between culture, or cultural factors, and diplomacy. He is naturally critical of previous scholarship like Samuel Huntington, who portrays the US-Arab dynamic as an almost biblical style “clash of civilizations” wherein the Muslim world is inherently hostile to the modern West. He is likewise critical of the “orientalist” idea from Douglas Little and Edward Said, who argue that Western racism toward Arabs has been detrimental to closer diplomatic relations. Instead, Yaqub argues that both sides were torn between two sets of common yet competing values. The first set—honor, sacrifice, solidarity, simplicity, and absolutism were associated with ideas of defeating evil. The second set—patience, pragmatism, compromise, subtlety, and moral relativism—was more moderate and suited to conciliation and deal-making. Neither side was able to compromise—each urging concillatory measures where the other demanded commitment. Thus, diplomacy in the Middle East during this time was, according to Yaqub, a clash of interests and priorities rather than civilizations that characterized the late 1950s.
One major strength of this book is Yaqub’s multi-archival approach and use of Arabic language sources. In so doing, he portrays Arab leaders as crucial actors rather than mere puppets. Because of his access to Arab sources, he manages to provide a robust understanding of Arab sentiment during this period. Yaqub also employs a wide range of newly declassified archival sources at the time of his research. However, this is still an overwhelmingly U.S. and British driven narrative due to the overall availability of sources. Regardless, Yaqub makes a vital contribution to the historiography of the Eisenhower administration and U.S./Middle Eastern relations during the period. However, he treats the Eisenhower Doctrine as something that rose and fell within three years, but this is inaccurate as it set the conditions for a U.S. commitment to the Middle East as a central part of U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond—from supporting Carter’s Rapid Response Force to supporting the Shah, and the creation of U.S. Central Command. Nevertheless, Containing Arab Nationalism is a thoroughly researched and well-argued look at the rise and fall of the Eisenhower Doctrine.