With that said, Eisenhower again demonstrated his acute strategic judgment, as he saw at the outset the real issue from the standpoint of American interests was to keep oil flowing to Europe, restrain the Europeans from neo-colonial nostrums, be more alluring to the main Arab powers than the Soviet Union was, promote Arab divisions, and try anything that might damp down the Arab-Jewish blood feud. Tactically, while he was right not to embark in any idea of Eden’s for trying to organize the Middle East, he gave up a bit prematurely, as time would show, the possibility of keeping Egypt out of the hands of the Russians. In his diary he expressed confidence that if Egypt could be rather isolated in the Arab world and its only important ally were the Soviet Union, “she would very quickly get sick of that prospect.”
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At a meeting with very senior foreign and military policy officials, including Dulles, Admiral Radford, and Defense Secretary Charles Wilson (none of whom knew anything about the Middle East), Eisenhower took a long step into darkness by approving Dulles’s advice to warn Nasser he could not walk arm-in-arm with the Russians and retain most-favored-nation status with the U.S. He proposed fumbling and punting forward negotiations about the great project of the Aswan High Dam, which was supposed vastly to increase Egyptian agricultural production; suspending the distribution of CARE aid to Egypt; increasing support to the Baghdad Pact without joining it; and accelerating discussions with the Saudis by offering extensive military assistance. It was a jumbled, self-contradictory mélange of proposals, putting forth a number of incomplete initiatives with that love of confusion that was so evident in Eisenhower’s responses to the press. Wooing the Saudis was a good idea, to undercut Nasser, secure Europe’s oil supply, and generally fragment the Arabs (at which they do not usually require much encouragement). But beyond that, it was a pastiche, inadequately thought through in comparison with Western European and even Far Eastern policy.
Eisenhower and Dulles should have realized the danger of Moscow stepping up to finance the Aswan project, which was a straight humanitarian development project of no military relevance. Stopping the shipment of CARE packages transposed to Eisenhower, his administration, and the country, the appearance of a Scroogian Presbyterian humbug and hypocrite, which was, unfortunately, not entirely a caricature of Dulles. This and the decision to back Diem’s lunge for an independent South Vietnam were steps that would greatly, and not very benignly, influence freighted decades to come in both regions. Eisenhower was a good foreign policy strategist, as he had been a fine military strategist, but where he had also been a very competent military tactician, he was, in foreign affairs, unlike in politics and congressional relations, very uneven, and Dulles, though an estimable man in many ways, was not a good choice to fill in where the president himself had an unsure grasp.
Nasser quickly discovered, if he had not known them already, the political virtues of anti-Americanism. He withdrew recognition of Chiang and transferred it to Mao Tse-tung’s regime at the end of May. On June 20, 1956, Eisenhower sent the head of the World Bank, Eugene Black, to Cairo to try to close the Aswan deal with Nasser, who layered in new conditions that the president considered unacceptable. The proposed deal included a grant of $70 million and a loan on favorable terms of $200 million. Eisenhower welcomed the opportunity to pull out, and when Nasser sent a message on July 19 accepting the American proposal of the previous month, Eisenhower had Dulles inform the Egyptian ambassador that day that the deal was off.
Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal on July 29 and taking over its operations. Eden, who had been making threatening noises for some time, was apoplectic and called for drastic measures. Eisenhower was not overly concerned and sent veteran diplomat Robert Murphy to London and Paris to cool out the British, warn both countries not to connect this to the Arab-Israeli confrontation (i.e., recruit the military assistance of Israel), and propose a conference of maritime nations. Eisenhower and his entourage thought Eden, who advised the president on July 31 that Britain intended to take military action to “break Nasser,” was overreacting, and suspected him of reaching too quickly for a military option in pursuit of what were to some degree quasi-colonial objectives. He also feared that Nasser was a plausible spokesman for Arab resentment of the West and for some legitimate Arab aspirations, and that he was “within his rights”
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to take the canal. He didn’t believe that Egypt would have much problem operating the Suez Canal, but feared that the seizure of it would incite similar ambitions by the Panamanians. And he also thought that such a military measure as Eden was planning would shut off Arab oil to Europe and require the redirection of some oil from the Americas to Europe, causing the imposition of rationing of gasoline in the United States.
At this point, Nasser was the only actor in this drama that was making any sense. The Arabs weren’t going to stop oil shipments to countries like Germany and Italy, which played no role in this; Iran certainly, and probably the Saudis and the Gulf states and emirates, would not touch a boycott; and none of the oil-producing countries had much affection for the Egyptians, and resented Nasser stirring up their populations underneath them. The idea of rationing in the U.S. to send oil and gasoline to Britain and France was absurd. And Eisenhower could not have imagined that Panama had any insane notions of its ability to evict the United States from the Panama Canal. Britain had withdrawn 80,000 troops from the Suez Canal area by agreement with Nasser, leaving it a sitting duck, and Egypt was no great military power, but was a large country. Panama (Chapter 8) was a tiny jungle state with no armed forces and completely dependent on the U.S., which had more than adequate defense forces in the legitimately constituted Canal Zone. (In the past 10 years, Britain had withdrawn over 300,000 of its armed forces from Greece, India, Palestine, and Suez, indicating how unwieldy the key units of its Empire had become, and in some cases, had long been.)
Eden had taken leave of his senses; Britain and France couldn’t occupy Egypt, a country of nearly 30 million people, or reestablish themselves by force in durable control of the Suez Canal, and had no evident ability to dispose of Nasser, which, if it could be done, would inflame the Arab world dangerously. But a conference, which Eisenhower sent Dulles to London to set up, was just Eisenhoweresque shilly-shallying and muddying the waters while tempers supposedly cooled. It was a completely inadequate response. Dulles was a little better, saying that Nasser must be made “to disgorge his theft,” but that the British had gone into both World Wars on the assumption that the U.S. would come in after to save them, and were about to gamble that the same thing would happen again. (In fact, they entered the World War I with no thought of the U.S., and it would be inaccurately flattering to Chamberlain to think he had any such thoughts in 1939.)
The British and the French certainly had the military ability to take back the canal, but had no ability to leave 200,000 troops there indefinitely to hold it. On August 12, the president and Dulles met the congressional leadership. Senate leader Lyndon Johnson said that the U.S. must support its allies and assist them in nonmilitary ways. Eisenhower disagreed, but assured the senators and congressmen that he would not “stand impotent and let this one man get away with it.” Dulles likened Nasser to Hitler and then left for his conference in London. Eisenhower had a dilemma but wasn’t doing anything serious to deal with it. Dulles got an 18–4 vote at his conference in favor of requiring that the Suez Canal be operated by an international board, and a committee chaired by Australia’s veteran prime minister Robert Menzies was delegated to try to sell the concept to Nasser.
To keep his place as vice president, Nixon, who had occupied the post with distinction, had to have recourse to surreptitious campaigns for write-in support as vice president in the uncontested Republican primaries, and faced other indignities, to resolve Eisenhower’s sadistic ambivalence about his suitability to continue. At one point, Eisenhower tried the bizarre gambit of suggesting that Nixon should wish to stay on as vice president only if he thought that he, Eisenhower, would not survive the term. Nixon overcame Eisenhower’s ambivalence, perhaps augmented by the president’s reluctance to acknowledge how much he owed Nixon for having been nominated in 1952. They were renominated by acclamation at San Francisco, to face Stevenson again, and Senator Estes Kefauver, and the president took a brief summer holiday. Overseas events proceeded apace.
Menzies arrived in Cairo on September 2. Nasser offered freedom of passage of the canal and equitable tolls, but refused to consider handing back control to anyone, as Eisenhower had foreseen. In correspondence with Eden over the next week, Eisenhower wrote that there could be no thought of force until the matter was referred to the United Nations, that Eden should end British mobilization and the withdrawal of British citizens from Egypt, that American opinion would not support force, that British huffing and puffing was strengthening Arab support for Nasser, and that Britain could not economically sustain prolonged military operations and the loss of Middle Eastern oil. He wrote that Eden would solidify Arab, African, and much Asian support for Nasser and would open the door of the Middle East to Russia, and that there were opportunities to divide the Arabs and undermine Nasser over time.
He was correct in much of this, but Britain and France could have made short work of Egypt militarily (they were still, next to the superpowers, the world’s two strongest nations militarily), there was no likelihood of a serious or leak-proof oil embargo (most of the exporters had no other source of income), and Eisenhower was in no position to get too exalted about how to handle Egypt, as he precipitated the problem by ducking out of the Aswan Dam project. It was a futile exchange, as Eden replied with warnings about a new Munich. He understood the dangers, but “we have many times led Europe in the fight for freedom. It would be an ignoble end to our long history if we tamely accepted to perish by degrees.” This was all moonshine, as Eden was hardly “fighting for freedom” and the end of British history was hardly at hand. Eisenhower replied more sensibly, mentioning super tankers that would make Suez less of a lifeline, and proposed unspecified economic pressures and the subsidization of increasing fissures in the Arab world.
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But Eden had reached a compulsive and hyperactive condition and Eisenhower was just dispensing bromides and palliatives. He could more profitably have dealt with the French, who were really just playing along to kick the Arabs in the shins and in solidarity with their great arms purchaser (largely with American money), Israel. French cynicism was a point of practical strength compared with Eden’s ravings and Eisenhower’s havering.
The next move was Dulles’s Suez Canal Users’ Association, a classic Dulles improvisation, which proposed to pilot ships through the canal in both directions and withhold payment of transit tolls. His proposal was, as he knew, absurd, but he formulated it so complicatedly (using similar techniques of dissembling and obfuscation as his chief) that he forced prolonged negotiations on the parties. These had scarcely begun when the British pilots abandoned their posts on September 14 and Nasser replaced them at once with Egyptian pilots, who kept the canal going at a slightly heightened rate of activity. Eisenhower let Eden know that any thought of force now was “ridiculous” and that he should accept Nasser’s offer of compensation.
The British and the French rather publicly mobilized their forces on Cyprus all through September. On October 8, Eisenhower told Under Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr. (who had replaced General Walter Bedell Smith) that he would not countenance a plan that from the correspondence appeared to be a coup d’état or even assassination attempt on Nasser, told him to issue an official statement in the most unambiguous terms that the United States would not agree with any act or threat of war in the Middle East, and told him to announce that the U.S. would immediately begin construction of 60,000-ton tankers that would reduce British and French dependence on the Suez Canal for oil and reduce the revenues of the canal. He directed the State Department to devise a plan, “any plan,”
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that might have some interest for Nasser, and to try to involve Nehru and the Organization of African Unity in the issue. It was illustrative of Eisenhower’s natural talents at enmeshing the most improbable entities, for which he normally had little use (he couldn’t abide Nehru but Nehru seemed to have a good relationship with Nasser, and the OAU was essentially a Black African organization that would have no leverage on Nasser), in controversies to confuse them, weigh them down, slow them up, and prevent bad and hot-headed things from happening. (Nasser and Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Tito would be the leaders of the world’s neutralist movement, and Nasser was briefly the head of the OAU a decade later.)
In mid-October, on a joint approach from Britain and France (whether sincere or just a diversionary fig leaf for what was coming has never been determined), UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld worked out six principles, including some concept of internationalization of the Suez Canal. But before Hammarskjöld could organize a visit to Nasser, another crisis blew up in Eastern Europe.
9. REVOLT IN BUDAPEST AND WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Following the release of Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress address denouncing Stalin, riots erupted in Poland in June, and the puppet satellite regime was thrown out and replaced by Wladyslaw Gomulka, whom the Soviets had forced out as a Titoist in 1948 and imprisoned in 1951, and who was only spared execution by the death of Stalin in 1953. (Tito had established Yugoslav independence from the USSR, though the country remained a communist dictatorship.) On October 22, the disturbances spread to Hungary, and the following day, the premier the Soviets had forced out as a loyalty risk (to them), Imre Nagy, was restored to office. Nagy promised democratization and a rising standard of living, and the Soviets dispatched forces from their occupation units in Hungary to Budapest to “maintain order.”