13
Harry truman’s de facto recognition of Israel ended one era in the American relationship, but a generation would pass before the United States and Israel became aligned. For the most critical years of Israel’s history, when the country was weak and poor, the United States was more interested in building relationships with Israel’s bitterest Arab opponents than with the Jewish state. Only after Israel developed nuclear weapons and emerged as a regional superpower did it move to the center of America’s diplomatic agenda. Israel did not grow strong because it had American support. It acquired American support because it had grown strong.
Those who forget this basic fact about the relationship often overestimate America’s leverage with Israel and form unrealistic ideas about the concessions that the United States can extract from Jerusalem. Those who hope that an end to the U.S.-Israel alliance would cripple the Jewish state should also take note. Israel, which was not formally designated an American ally until Ronald Reagan declared Israel a “major non-NATO ally” in 1987, desperately wanted American military and diplomatic support during its early years. Losing that support would be a serious blow today, but in a world where Russia, India, China, and Japan all admire Israeli tech and Israeli military and intelligence capabilities, if abandoned by Washington, Israel would not remain friendless for long.
Just as Truman’s policy toward the crisis of British Palestine was driven by his reading of the international situation as a whole, subsequent American presidents hardly considered Israel policy in a vacuum. The Cold War was America’s overriding strategic concern during the first forty years of Israeli independence, and the logic of the Cold War as American policymakers understood it kept the United States and Israel at arm’s length during the 1950s and brought the two countries closer together in the 1970s.
The Cold War forced a massive reassessment and in some ways a reinvention of American foreign policy. World War II left the United States the richest, most powerful, and most widely admired country in the world. Americans had long expected that their day of global preeminence would come. Even before the Revolution, farsighted Americans like Benjamin Franklin had looked at the size and fertility of the American landmass and the dynamism of American society and formed the belief that in the fullness of time the United States would be the greatest power in the world. Now that time had come, but the bed of roses they had expected had somehow turned into a crown of thorns.
The dream had never been just or even principally about power and prestige within the existing state system. Americans had also long dreamed of a decisive victory for American ideas on the stage of world history, a victory that would express itself in the transformation of international politics. After World War II, principles like self-determination swept the world, but not always in forms that simplified the task of American foreign policy. The European empires that Americans had long resented lay humbled in the dust, but the result was a weak Europe and a world unable to resist Soviet power without American help. At the same time, many of the peoples newly emerging from colonial bondage seemed bent on exercising their rights of self-determination under communist leadership.
By 1949, history and geopolitics, which had been moving extraordinarily rapidly and kaleidoscopically since 1945, had begun to settle into the shape they would retain for the next four decades, and Washington policymakers began to come to terms with the long-term implications of the new world situation. Clearly, the ideas and the methods of Lodge-era diplomacy would no longer suffice. It was not enough for the United States to cooperate with central bankers, press for disarmament, preach moral sentiments, and wish our friends well. More active policies, not to mention more dangerous and expensive ones, would be needed to maintain world peace. The illusions of the “One World” liberals would also have to be set aside. Good intentions and high hopes would not make the United Nations an effective substitute for American power in the postwar world.
In confronting this stark new reality, Americans were driven by both their hopes and their fears. American culture is fundamentally an optimistic culture. The American experience for more than three centuries was one of material and social progress. An entrepreneurial, forward-looking people set in a rich continent, most Americans have been drawn to optimistic readings of history and of the human potential for improvement. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this cultural optimism was reflected in the development of a benign vision of a peaceful and gradual transformation of human history in a new kind of progressive march to a utopian future. As we’ve seen, many Americans came to believe, either as a religious idea or as a secular vision, that the gradual improvement of economic and social conditions that they saw taking place around them would culminate in a universal reign of peace. Liberal Christians interpreted this through the lens of scripture, arguing that human progress would eventually lead to the peaceful return of Christ and the establishment of a millennial kingdom. For secular thinkers, visions of the utopian future looked to a democratic world in which the nations of the world would renounce war, embrace democracy, and cooperate to establish universal equality and prosperity.
We’ve already seen how the dissolution of the great eastern empires in Europe and the Middle East began to challenge the habitual optimism of American opinion in the nineteenth century. Economic development, the spread of education, and the rise of democracy were not turning the imperial zone into a paradise of liberal enlightenment. Vicious ethnic, religious, and nationalistic rivalries erupted in succession, and, to the accompaniment of ethnic cleansings and genocides, a series of escalating wars boiled out of the region, progressively forcing American engagement and culminating in the Second World War.
The struggle of the American mind to reconcile what looked to be the catastrophic arc of world history into a series of escalating and ultimately exterminatory wars with the national faith in liberal values was a difficult one. It became more difficult as American power grew even while the world itself seemed to be lurching closer to final destruction. Two events at the end of World War II crystallized the feeling of unease into what would remain a bedrock perception in the United States.
On July 22, 1944, Soviet troops liberated the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, Poland. The Nazi guards were not prepared for the speed of the Soviet advance, and they were unable to destroy the evidence of what had taken place there. Majdanek had not primarily been an extermination center like Auschwitz or Treblinka. It was a forced labor camp for Polish Jews temporarily spared from extermination, although it sometimes served as a killing site when other facilities were not available. Something like 100,000 Jews and a smaller number of Poles had been imprisoned or murdered in the camp between its construction in 1941 and its liberation.[1] Shocked at what they saw there, Soviet commanders quickly contacted higher authorities, and journalists and photographers were brought in to share the information with the world.[2]
There had been many reports about Nazi extermination camps, and by 1943 most people in both Germany and the West knew at least something about the murder of the Jews and other atrocities under Hitler’s rule. Abstract knowledge, however, is one thing, but the photographs of stacked corpses, rows of skulls, mounds of shoes, emaciated survivors, piles of human hair, and other grisly relics of systematized murder reverberated across the world and forced a new reckoning with the bleak realities of human nature for many people in the United States. Over the next nine months as Allied troops slowly overcame the resistance of the Reich’s defenders, the horrors of more camps were gradually uncovered and progressively revealed to the world. Evil, pure, cold, and calculating, had taken its seat in the most advanced and enlightened culture in Europe, and the revelation of what had been done seared the conscience but also challenged the fundamental assumptions of what, for most Americans, was their basic outlook on life.
The outpouring of detailed evidence about German crimes, the Holocaust above all, but also the fiendish atrocities committed by so many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and officials from Occupied France to the Soviet Union, scarred the American conscience in ways that still affect us today. There were other atrocities in that terrible age, the homicidal madness and twisted hate the Japanese manifested in their drive across China, the everyday brutality of Stalinist rule—but the German crimes left a deeper impression on the American mind. Next to Britain, Germany was the nation to which Americans felt closest. Only the British Isles (Ireland included) had contributed more immigrants to the United States than Germany.[3]
For most Americans of the mid-twentieth century, the moral collapse of Germany was something that Americans couldn’t explain away by attributing it to some alleged defect of race. Germany was a white, Protestant, European culture of the highest level. Many of the Protestant churches of Germany had close associations with leading American denominations and thinkers, and those churches, for the most part, had followed Hitler into hell with little or no resistance. If Germany, the land of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and Kant, could fall in this way, what did this mean for liberal hopes about enlightenment, progress, and the ultimate destiny of the human race? What prospect was there for the kind of peaceful, liberal world Americans hoped so desperately to build? Was there some ineradicable horror at the heart of human nature, some depraved hunger for power and for death that all the education, all the enlightenment in the world could never fully uproot?
The second event of those momentous years that still shakes the foundations of our world was America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945. The bombs were part of a massive air offensive against Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the closing months of the Pacific War,[4] and they transformed the human condition in ways we still struggle to grasp and to cope with today.
The historicization of the eschaton, the migration of the concept of the end of the world from the realm of myth to the realm of politics, had, as we’ve seen, long been a factor in Americans’ understanding of their country and its world role. With the explosion in Hiroshima, the end of the world entered the realm of politics and policy in a new and much more terrifying way. As the outlandish concept of “mutually assured destruction” entrenched itself as a pillar of American strategic thought, the end of the world was no longer a purely speculative concept. In think tanks, in university seminars, in military planning sessions, American defense intellectuals and officials were integrating the possibility of a nuclear holocaust into their scenario planning. And it was not only officials and military planners who grappled with these realities. As the two superpowers developed missiles capable of striking targets thousands of miles away with nuclear weapons delivered at supersonic speeds, the reality that humanity could now drive itself into extinction percolated into the consciousness of ordinary people across the planet.
That the Holocaust and the attack on Hiroshima came almost simultaneously at the conclusion of the most terrible war humanity had ever fought helped drive the horror home around the world. The capacity for evil revealed in the Holocaust combined with the capacity for destruction revealed by the explosion at Hiroshima opened up a prospect that few could contemplate calmly and that none could ignore. Seventy years later, the shock of these events has not faded, and we still struggle to manage their consequences.
The near-simultaneous eruption of absolute evil and the emergence of an absolute power of destruction into human history transformed the nature of politics and international relations. Avoiding a recurrence of the genocidal madness and unspeakable cruelty of the Hitler movement, and avoiding nuclear suicide, would from the 1940s come to be basic tasks that policymakers and political movements would put at the center of their missions. The United States was becoming a global power at a uniquely dire moment in the history of the human race.
The American Mission
Facing these terrifying truths, the vast majority of Americans believed this situation called them to lead. Belief in some kind of singular world role had always been an element in American thought. From the Puritan beginning, through the Revolution and Civil War periods, Americans had always believed that what was happening in their country would, in due course, play a decisive role in world events.
The United States had always been a more outward-looking nation than isolationists wanted it to be, or remembered it as being. American business and American missionaries had been active in the Middle East, South and East Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the early days of the republic. American universities began admitting students from the non-European, non-Atlantic world in the 1850s. American forces had been stationed in the South Pacific and the Mediterranean from the early decades of the nineteenth century. Well before the Spanish-American War, American forces had been engaged in military action on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.[5]
The global engagement of the United States had not been the private preserve of elites. Appalachian backwoodsmen dug ginseng root for the China trade.[6] Semiliterate sailors served on whaling ships. In a time when more than half of all Americans earned their living from farms, the export trade was vital to farm prices.[7] Thomas Jefferson’s embargo of Britain and France led to bankruptcies across the American farming economy; Britain’s repeal of the Corn Laws opened up a rich export market that helped fuel westward expansion.
Missionary activity, which involved both religious proselytization and what we would now think of as development work and human rights advocacy, also brought millions of ordinary Americans into the sphere of international activity and awareness. Black American congregations raised money for mission work in Africa.[8] Small churches across rural America regularly raised money for missions abroad. Through letters and publications and from lectures by missionaries home on fundraising trips, millions of Americans followed the progress of Christianity and modernization from China to Peru. Women played an outsized role in this movement. Barred from many professions, from political careers, and from pastoring churches or leading denominational bodies, women found opportunities in the foreign mission field to lead big-budget organizations, acquire and use professional skills at home and abroad, and chart an independent course as single women took up foreign mission careers.[9]
The soldiers, missionaries, educators, and merchants who had pioneered America’s global engagement and the national strategists who, from the time of George Washington forward, had looked to the moment when the United States would be the most powerful nation on earth saw their vision fulfilled after World War II. But America’s transition to world leadership was far more epochal and far more challenging than anyone had expected. The United States had been summoned to take the lead in a global battle for the survival of freedom and the human race itself. The experience of confronting, first, the horrifically evil and brutal empires of Axis Germany and Japan, and then of leading the battle against the Stalinist and Maoist empires of institutionalized mass murder and human repression, left a deep imprint on Americans of the time. The United States might not be perfect, but its enemies appeared to be about as close to pure evil as any political systems had ever been. A nation long steeped in a Christian and Protestant worldview could not interpret these events other than through the prism of a divine calling and mission. The historicization of the eschaton led, among Americans, to an Americanization of history. Given the reality of American power and its centrality to international politics in what looked like the climactic stages of the human story, many Americans began to think of history as something that America made and was responsible for. It was America’s job to save the planet by sound policy, wise leadership, and, when no better way could be found, by the courageous use of necessary force.
As Americans tried to think this mission through, they saw two interconnected efforts: a political and military strategy aimed at containing communism, and a global agenda that would transform the free world. They hoped to eliminate the specter of great power war among noncommunist countries even as they worked to contain the Soviet Union without direct conflict, and they adopted a mix of policies to achieve that. One was to build on the lessons of the Marshall Plan, and to embark on a quest for development for the postcolonial countries emerging from the wreckage of the old empires. Another was to develop a network of security partnerships, economic institutions, political institutions, and a body of international law that would reduce the probability of war. The Americans hoped that a network of interlocking institutions, a surge in economic growth promoting interdependent prosperity, a legal basis for international life ultimately expressed in the United Nations and similar institutions, and a set of enduring military commitments and alliances backed ultimately by the strength and commitment of the United States would stave off the nightmare of nuclear war and open a path to the future for the world.
It was clear to American policymakers in the early Cold War era that these goals required a much greater investment of American money, political effort, and military power than the nation had ever before expended in time of peace. After all, the goal was to transform the world, to stop the series of ever-more-destructive great power wars that threatened to exterminate humankind. Given that none of the postwar allied states could withstand the Soviet Union on its own, this meant that American security commitments had to be extended. Given the interconnected nature of economic prosperity with the fight against communism and the struggle for stability, the guarantees had to go beyond military security. It was up to the United States, the only country with the resources for such a task, to provide the framework for postwar recovery and long-term prosperity.
The new forms of American guarantees and support for both developed and developing allies in the Cold War differ so much from the Lodge consensus and what had come before it as to amount to a new dispensation. Under the Lodge consensus, Americans minimized their military and financial commitments abroad. That approach would not work in the Cold War. To nations that were willing to join in resisting the spread of communist totalitarianism, America offered to do whatever it took to defend its allies. This would include bearing any price, be it in money or blood, to keep the allies independent. Like wealthy colleges who accept students without regard to their financial circumstances, committing to provide whatever scholarship aid students require, America offered a “needs blind” alliance; countries like South Korea that needed a lot of help would get whatever they needed—as long as they did their part. Countries that needed less would get less. And while America always had a preference for liberalism, capitalism, and democracy, it was willing to work with any form of government—from social democracies to authoritarian dictatorships—that was willing to resist the bigger enemy.
Beyond that, in order to reestablish the kind of open global trading system that the British Empire had fostered at its height, the United States undertook to provide various global public goods. The American navy would ensure the security of the world’s sea lanes. The United States would provide the bulk of the financing for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The United States, despite its long-standing commitment to industrial protection, would open its markets, in many cases on a nonreciprocal basis, to other countries.
The implications of these immense changes in policy took many years to work themselves out. When Harry Truman announced the Truman Doctrine as the British withdrew from Turkey and Greece, he did not foresee the full consequences of America’s new international stance. He did not, for example, understand that as the United States extended protection to countries threatened by the Soviet Union but who hated one another, American diplomats would be committed to years of shuttle diplomacy and cat herding as they attempted to keep Greeks and Turks, Koreans and Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis, Argentines and Brazilians, Malaysians and Indonesians, Saudis and (before 1979) Iranians, and, of course, Arabs and Israelis, from letting their mutual rivalries and distrust spill over into actions that would disrupt the Pax Americana. That 2,700,000 American troops would serve in Vietnam (the largest number at any given time was 549,500 in 1968),[10] that there would still be U.S. military bases in both Europe and Japan seventy years after World War II and a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the American navy would be undertaking Freedom of Navigation Operations in the South China Sea to protect Philippine claims to offshore waters—none of this, of course, was in Truman’s mind in 1947 when he initiated the change in American diplomacy.
In the early years of the new dispensation, the Truman administration tried to limit the geographic scope of its increasingly open-ended commitments. The immediate focus of America’s containment policy was restricted to Western Europe, Japan, and the southern perimeter of the Soviet empire (Turkey, Greece, Iran). Countries in these key areas would benefit from essentially unlimited American guarantees, with all the economic and military assistance they required up to the use of nuclear weapons. Events and the logic of world politics would force both Truman and his successors to extend the new dispensation to more and more places. When on June 25, 1950, North Korean troops backed by both Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR invaded South Korea, they were offering a direct challenge to the security of Japan. The result was a demonstration of just how open-ended America’s new foreign policy could be.
At the peak of the Korean War, the United States committed 327,000 troops and would spend $388 billion fighting the war.[11] In 1952, the U.S. spent 4.2 percent of its GDP on the Korean War, and 13.2 percent on defense in general.[12] Thirty-six thousand, five hundred and seventy-four Americans died in theater, while 103,284 were wounded.[13] The U.S. also marshaled a global coalition of fifteen other U.N. member states, and armed and equipped both South Korea and many of the allied states. President Eisenhower even threatened explicitly to use nuclear weapons, both to secure a cease-fire and to protect it against violation.[14] The verdict was clear: America was willing to hold up its end of the bargain to the uttermost.
During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the increasingly globalized conflict spread throughout the world, and over the next few decades almost all of Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East was touched in some way by this conflict. By the 1970s, the Soviet Union had established itself as a major power in the Middle East. This extension of the Cold War rivalry into Israel’s neighborhood would transform American-Israeli relations much as it transformed relations with other countries around the world.
The overall arc of American engagement with the world during the Cold War was set very early on. In the years and decades that followed World War II, Americans built on these foundations to create an extraordinary network of public, nonprofit, and corporate institutions and initiatives that form the foundation of global society even today. The American military, intelligence, and diplomatic services became larger by orders of magnitude and engaged on a profound level with other governments and societies around the world. American corporations led in the creation of the multinational enterprise that came to dominate the postwar international economy. American agricultural and industrial scientists and engineers played a major role in the economic development of dozens of countries. American experts helped many postcolonial countries construct states, and American universities played an increasing role in providing the training for the people who would run them. Mission groups, whose presence and impact in the postwar era grew substantially (despite setbacks like their expulsion from China),[15] were joined by secular NGOs on an increasing basis. Health care, women’s rights, fights for press freedom, the rule of law, and political democracy—U.S.-based and U.S.-funded NGOs led the way in the development of new kinds of civil society organizations.
At home, Americans created a vastly expanded infrastructure to train the specialists who would work on these projects. Old academic disciplines like anthropology and sociology were transformed; new disciplines like regional studies and development economics were created.
Americans no longer dominate the vast activities of this global civil society the way they did in the 1940s and 1950s. As Europe recovered from the war and as postcolonial countries began to generate their own ideas and institutions, the nature of international life changed in many ways. Yet the ever larger and ever more complex structure of international institutions and civil society continued along many of the lines that came out of the initial U.S.-based burst of creative activity in the decade following World War II.
This enormous burst of creative and, in large part, constructive statesmanship and activism was not, of course, a purely philanthropic program. Americans hoped above all to ensure their own security, survival, and prosperity by adopting this program. And they were no more secure against the temptations of using their power to obtain advantageous agreements than anybody else. Nevertheless, to large majorities of Americans in the postwar decades, it appeared that America’s self-interests were bound up in the general interests of humanity and that the United States would best serve itself by seeking its own future in the promotion of harmony and prosperity abroad. This did not, at first, imply any special concern for the struggling nation of Israel.
Arm’s Length
The first era in U.S.-Israel relations was a cold and distant one. During the summer of 1948 American officials began to understand the Soviet bloc’s role in Israel’s military successes. Not only was Israel getting Soviet bloc arms, and providing in exchange hard currency that helped the Czechoslovakian Communist Party solidify its power. It was also violating the United Nations arms embargo.[16] The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing advancing Israeli forces created another humanitarian disaster in a world still suffering the aftereffects of the Second World War. Public opinion in the Arab world was enraged both by the failure of the Arab states to defeat the Zionist upstarts in 1948–49 and by the plight of Arab Palestinian refugees.[17] The warnings of State Department and CIA opponents of Israeli independence all seemed to be coming true.
Having opposed Israel’s declaration of independence up until the last minute, American policy shifted toward one of trying to limit Israel’s military gains. The Israelis, who had only accepted the boundaries of the U.N. partition plan with reluctance, had no intention of abiding by them once the Arabs went to war. Between May of 1948 and the final cease-fire in 1949, Washington backed proposals to stop the fighting, allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and reduce Israel’s territorial gains.[18]
The coolness between the two countries did not end quickly. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the quest for an alliance with Egypt dominated American regional policy. During the critical early years of Israeli independence, Washington policymakers believed that Egypt was the key to the Middle East and that good relations with Arab nationalists and military rulers offered greater promise for American Cold War strategy than an alliance with Israel. Even if Kennan and Marshall lost the battle over partition and recognition, their perspective on Israel dominated official thinking in Washington. The United States, it was widely believed, could not enjoy close relations with both Israel and the Arab world, and the Arab world was almost infinitely more important to American security and prosperity than the tiny Jewish state.
President Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, built their Middle East policy around an effort to form anti-Soviet alliances with Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Iraq. The countries fell in line relatively easily, except for Egypt, which was more elusive.[19] Developing a strong relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt would remain, on and off, an important American goal until the Kennedy administration regretfully abandoned it.
The intellectual case for this policy looked compelling at the time. Once the Marshall Plan and the NATO alliance had limited communism’s spread in Europe, the Middle East looked to be the soft underbelly of the West. As the weakest point in the chain of states the West was attempting to construct around the Soviet Union and as a strategically vital artery of communications and a base for airpower to be used against Moscow, the Middle East, judged policymakers, was both vital to American security and vulnerable to communist penetration.
Oil, as always, played a significant role in American calculations. The Middle East offered the only possible source for the oil that Europe’s Marshall Plan–fueled economic recovery would require. As American oil imports gradually rose through the 1950s,[20] American oil companies needed to maintain and if possible expand their role in Middle Eastern energy production, and American policymakers were forced to pay increasing attention to the security of the nation’s oil supply.
Although its energy resources were minimal, Egypt’s large population, cultural influence, relative political cohesion, and location (home of the Suez Canal) made Egypt the most important of the Arab countries from the Washington policy perspective. The Egyptian revolution that overthrew the ineffectual British ally King Farouk and ultimately brought Nasser to power pointed toward a new future for the region. The Middle East was full of British-aligned monarchies and sheikhdoms. Americans, convinced that most of these regimes were doomed to fall, wanted to ensure that British colonialism was not equated in Arab minds with the United States.[21] American strategists felt that events in Egypt could determine the direction of postcolonial regimes not only in the Middle East but throughout the developing world.
The world was a dangerous place in the 1950s. Even as the success of the Marshall Plan led to a stabilization of Western Europe, the emergence of new and often fragile and underdeveloped states across the rest of the world created opportunities for communist advances. New, postcolonial states struggled to establish control over their territory and to develop the institutions that would cement order and lay the foundations for development. For American foreign policy, these new nations were both an opportunity and a threat. On the positive side, Americans believed that with American technical assistance, development advice, and foreign aid, these new countries could develop and become strong American allies. Understanding that nationalism was the strongest political force in many emerging states, Americans wanted to win the nationalists over. Often, this involved working with the professional military in civilian states or with army officers who seized power either as part of independence struggles or soon thereafter.
The military forces of foreign countries, many American strategists and academics believed at this time, could play a critical role in the development of their societies. Unlike the old feudal and aristocratic elites from the premodern period, military officers had often been educated in technical subjects in military academies organized along western lines, and believed in the development of strong nation-states. The idea was that the military would be the agent of technocratic modernization, breaking the stranglehold of feudal landlords through land reform, building infrastructure for urbanization and industrialization, and promoting social reforms like universal education that would diminish the appeal of communism while accelerating the pace of economic development.
America had a lot to offer modernizing foreign officers: professional training with the United States armed forces, increasingly recognized as the best equipped and best trained forces in the world; military assistance including weapons that were as glamorous as they were powerful; and a range of development programs, technical assistance, and loans and grants. Many newly independent states perceived themselves as choosing between capitalist and socialist growth models. The United States desperately wanted to keep these states out of Moscow’s orbit and it hoped that the military establishments in the developing world—often the strongest and most dynamic institutions in postcolonial governments still struggling to establish themselves—would be drawn into an America-supported and capitalist modernization paradigm.
Americans at this time saw their ability to work with nationalist modernizers as a crucial advantage in the competition with European colonial powers as well as with the Soviet and Chinese communists. French, British, Dutch, and Belgian rule, however indirect and light by the end of World War II, especially compared with Soviet rule of its own territories, was almost infinitely galling to nationalists of every description. Local rulers who continued to cooperate with the colonial powers looked like quislings to many nationalists, and one of the reasons Americans disliked colonial rule at this time was the concern that, even if the colonial power preserved order for the time being, its rule alienated the best elements in a rising people, and could force patriots into alliance with communists. The Arab world, particularly the non-oil-producing countries, was comparatively much more advanced with respect to Asia in the early 1950s than it is now; Egypt had one of the largest stock markets in the developing world and its location close to Europe made it look like one of the postcolonial countries heading for success.[22] Britain and France were hated through much of the Arab world. During the 1950s France would be fighting a brutal colonial war in a vain attempt to maintain its hold on Algeria. For Nasser, Britain, the former colonial power in Egypt, still in control of the Suez Canal, was the great enemy. To build up an anti-Soviet coalition in the Arab world, the United States needed to demonstrate to Nasser and other Arab nationalists that it was possible to overthrow imperialism without reaching out to Moscow. At the same time, Americans understood that drawing a strong contrast between the virtuous, freedom-loving United States and the scheming imperialist powers could be helpful to American oil companies in the ongoing regional competition.
An alliance with Nasser and his fellow Arab nationalists was so clearly desirable that the Eisenhower administration went to great lengths and paid a heavy price to build bridges to Cairo. Prior to the Suez Crisis, the United States offered Nasser arms, food, and a willingness to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam. In 1956, Eisenhower forced France, Britain, and Israel to return the Suez Canal and the Sinai to Egyptian control after their joint invasion. This was not only an open break with Israel; it was a dramatic rupture with two of America’s most important allies at the height of the Cold War.
In addition to diplomatic support, the Americans offered cold, hard cash. In 1955, the year before the Suez Crisis, Eisenhower and Congress gave Egypt $506 million in economic aid. In the Kennedy administration, as fears of the Soviet influence in the Middle East increased, aid reached $1.3 billion in 1962. A similar pattern emerged as Americans worried more about Soviet designs on the region. From 1950 to 1958, U.S. aid to Iran climbed from $103 million to over $1 billion, making it the largest recipient of American aid in the Middle East between 1946 and 1976.
Aid to Israel, by contrast, was minimal, and with the exception of $6 million in loans and grants was largely restricted to humanitarian assistance as Israel resettled hundreds of thousands of refugees from Europe and the Arab world.[23] On a per capita basis, total humanitarian and economic aid to Israel was roughly comparable to the aid the United States gave Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).[24] As long as building a close relationship with Nasser’s Egypt was the primary goal of America’s Middle East policy, keeping Israel at arm’s length was seen as a vital American concern.
Ultimately the policy of conciliating Nasser failed. Nasser chose the Soviet Union over the United States as his principal source of arms and foreign credit, and he refused to moderate his foreign policy in order to improve relations with Washington. The problem was that Washington’s vision for the Middle East and Nasser’s ambitions did not mesh. Nasser believed that the Arab people should be united into one state, and that this state, combining the oil resources of the Gulf with the populations of countries like Syria and Egypt, would become a great global force. The Arabs, led of course by Egypt and Nasser himself, would in his vision rise from European and Turkish colonialism to reestablish the place among the world’s leading powers they had enjoyed in the early centuries of the Islamic era.
The United States opposed this intoxicating vision. For reasons that had nothing to do with Israeli interests, the Eisenhower administration and its successors did not want a Greater Egypt or a United Arab Republic that would conquer or cow the oil sheikhdoms and dominate the region’s oil resources. The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations were prepared to support Nasser’s efforts to build up Egypt as one Arab state among many, but they opposed his pan-Arab ideas and were unwilling to underwrite his effort to become the hegemonic power in the oil-rich Middle East. For Nasser, the hegemonic ambitions were the whole point.
By the end of his time in office, Eisenhower had largely given up on Nasser, but the end of the American effort to engage came in the 1960s as a result of Nasser’s continuing attempts to extend his power across the Arab world. In 1958, Syria and Egypt were united in the United Arab Republic under Nasser’s leadership in what was hailed by some and feared by others as the first step in the formation of a pan-Arab power. The Egypt-Syria union broke up in 1961 when conservative business interests in Syria supported a coup to prevent Egyptian officials from nationalizing Syrian business, but the break with Syria did not end Nasser’s dreams. In 1962, in a move that eventually attracted Soviet support, Nasser sent thousands of troops across the Red Sea to Yemen in support of a coup by military officers against that country’s British-aligned monarchy. In 1963, anti-Nasser governments in Syria and Iraq were both overthrown. On April 17 of that year, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt called for the establishment of a new, tripartite United Arab Republic. They also began to push the overthrow of the king of Jordan so that a “free” Jordan could join the emerging Arab union.[25]
As was often the case, grandiose rhetoric about Arab unity and undying friendship proved hollow; the military officers who led the coups in Syria and Iraq soon became Nasser’s bitter rivals. Nevertheless, by the time Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy, the option of basing America’s regional policy on an understanding with Nasser no longer looked realistic.
Respect
As policymakers contemplated the ruin of America’s Nasser policy, the rise of Israel was impossible to ignore. Much to the surprise of everyone, Israeli leaders very much included, the relatively poor and weak Israel of the late 1940s quickly grew into a significant military power. The Suez Crisis of 1956 might have ended in humiliation for Britain and France, but it was impossible to miss the reality that Israeli forces inflicted a notable defeat on the Egyptian army before international intervention brought an end to the combat. Meanwhile, Israeli scientists (with French help in the crucial early stages) were making rapid progress on the development of nuclear weapons.[26] Only the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France had nuclear weapons in 1960. That a state of just over two million inhabitants, surrounded by enemies and with extremely limited natural resources, could accomplish a technological feat which taxed the ability of the great powers was as shocking as it was impressive. It also boded poorly for efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Power speaks to power. As Israel became a stronger country with more freedom of action in a region of vital interest to the United States, American presidents had more reasons to want to influence Israeli policy. Left to its own devices, Israel could destabilize the Middle East by preemptive attacks on its neighbors. Fear of Israel’s growing military might could make Arab regimes more eager for high-tech weapons sales from the Soviet Union. Fear of those weapons would make Israeli attacks more likely. In a worst-case scenario, the Israeli nuclear program, Americans feared, could set off a regional nuclear arms race. This, unsurprisingly, was a destructive cycle that the United States wished to avoid.
At the same time, Israel’s growing capacities could also assist the United States in blocking the Soviet Union and frustrating the ambitions of aspiring hegemons like Nasser. Thanks to the mass expulsions of Jews from Arab lands in the 1950s and the rapid development of intelligence capabilities in a country fighting for survival, Israel had unmatched intelligence about the region.[27] Israel also proved quietly useful to the anti-Nasser forces in Yemen.[28] American policy in the Middle East needed to take this new reality on board.
The first major sale of an American weapons system to Israel illustrates the mix of concerns shaping American policy in the Kennedy years. During Kennedy’s short presidency the world went to the brink of nuclear war between the superpowers twice: during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and again in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 ended atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons at a time when the Soviets had recently tested a 50-megaton bomb (more than 3,300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) in the atmosphere. Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons was one of Kennedy’s most important objectives, and the Israeli program was one of the world’s most advanced nuclear efforts.
Kennedy was willing to go to the mat with Israeli leaders to get regular American inspections of the Dimona complex to ensure that Israel didn’t have a nuclear weapons program. Ben-Gurion was equally determined to press forward with the nuclear program that, he believed, would be Israel’s ultimate safeguard.[29]
Pressuring Israel could not just be a matter of sticks. Carrots would also be needed. Reassuring Israel that the United States was unequivocally committed to its security was, Kennedy believed, the best and perhaps the only way to persuade Israel to give up its quest for nuclear weapons. Arms sales would reduce Israeli fears and build their confidence in American guarantees and commitments. For Kennedy, arms sales to Israel flowed very naturally out of his desire to modify Israeli behavior. To block Israel’s nuclear program, Kennedy would mix threats and offers of aid, as well as flattery and kind words. Kennedy was the first president to use the term “special relationship” to describe U.S.-Israel relations, explicitly comparing it to the U.S.-U.K. relationship in a conversation with Golda Meir, then Israeli foreign minister.[30]
Had Kennedy lived, it is likely he would have continued to oppose the Israeli nuclear program, but he would probably not have stopped it. At the time of Kennedy’s death, a flood of Soviet arms to radical Arab regimes was unsettling both Israel and the conservative Arab states. The Middle East was becoming more complicated: Israel was more powerful and the Soviet Union was expanding its footprint. What some called the “Arab Cold War” between radicals like Nasser and the monarchies was intensifying and becoming more of a concern for the United States.
During Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Middle East matters were on the back burner as U.S. attention shifted to the Vietnam War, America’s largest and costliest military effort since World War II. Not even the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel crushed the military forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in a spectacular sequence of air strikes and ground attacks, could divert official American attention for long from the conflict in Asia. Increasingly frustrated by liberal opposition to the war that was consuming his presidency, in September 1966 Johnson reportedly told Malcolm Tarlov, the head of Jewish War Veterans, that American Jews would receive a better hearing about Israel if they openly and strongly supported his Vietnam policy.[31] Enough American Jewish leaders were outraged by the comments that the president was forced to issue a grudging and guarded walk-back.[32] American Jews were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Johnson’s Great Society programs, but a large majority refused then, as before and after, to privilege Israeli interests over their own convictions about American foreign policy.
The ease with which Israel defeated threatening Arab armies in 1967 shocked most of the world, but not Washington. The American intelligence agencies that in 1948 had warned Truman about Jewish Palestine’s incipient demise reassured Johnson that in less than two decades, the Israeli military had become strong enough to pummel any combination of Arab powers. This time they were right, and when Israel responded to an Egyptian naval blockade and escalating threats by launching surprise preemptive air strikes, Israel conquered the Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, and West Bank of the Jordan River in six days.[33] The radical Arab rulers in Syria and Egypt proved no more effective at crushing Israel than their more conservative predecessors. Jordan, whose British-trained, led, and armed troops put up the most effective resistance against Israel in 1948–49, retreated ignominiously from the West Bank as Israeli forces overran positions in Jerusalem and its vicinity that Jordanians had successfully defended two decades earlier.
Although the Six-Day War only revealed to all what many American decision makers had already recognized, it changed Israel’s position in world opinion. To many American Christians, Israel’s seemingly miraculous victory and Jerusalem’s reunification seemed to confirm some of the most cherished tenets of their faith. Even in the midst of turmoil at home and wars abroad, God had preserved his people, who had triumphed over their adversaries yet again against what, to lay observers, seemed to be miraculous odds.
At the same time, the western left’s sympathy for Israel began to erode following its dramatic military victory. Instead of creating a trade unionist’s paradise on the Mediterranean, the Jewish state had become a military juggernaut. When Israeli prime minister Golda Meir contemplated preemptive attacks against Egypt and Syria in the tense lead-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger warned her that most other nations would condemn Israel even though they had turned a blind eye to similar tactics in 1967. David could seize any weapons that came to hand; Goliath had to show more restraint.[34]
Israel’s victory opened the door for deeper cooperation between Jerusalem and Washington. The United States replaced France as Israel’s greatest weapons supplier after consummating a deal for 150 military aircraft.[35] But it took a different administration to create a functional alliance between the United States and Israel.