About this item
This major retelling of the Suez Crisis of 1956 - one of the most important events in the history of US policy in the Middle East - shows how President Eisenhower came to realize that Israel, not Egypt, is Americas strongest regional ally.. In 1956 President Nasser of Egypt moved to take possession of the Suez Canal, thereby bringing the Middle East to the brink of war. The British and the French, who operated the canal, joined with Israel in a plan to retake it by force. Despite the special relationship between England and America, Dwight Eisenhower intervened to stop the invasion. In Ikes Gamble, Michael Doran shows how Nasser played the US, invoking Americas opposition to European colonialism to drive a wedge between Eisenhower and two British Prime Ministers, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. Meanwhile, in his quest to make himself the strongman of the Arab world, Nasser was making weapons deals with the USSR and destabilizing other Arab countries that the US had been courting. The Suez Crisis was his crowning triumph. In time, Eisenhower would conclude that Nasser had duped him, that the Arab countries were too fractious to anchor Americas interests in the Middle East, and that the US should turn instead to Israel. 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.
About the Author
Michael Doran sits in a tank and thinks - mainly about the Middle East. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, but in the past, he served in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. He also worked at the Brookings Institution, and taught at NYU, Princeton, and the University of Central Florida.
He is the author of two path-breaking articles. "Somebody Else's Civil War" (Foreign Affairs, 2002) was the first to advance the "near-enemy/far-enemy" thesis: the idea that, on 9/11, al-Qaeda attacked the far enemy, the United States, as a way of striking at the near enemy, Muslim regimes in the Middle East. "Obama's Secret Iran Strategy" (Mosaic Magazine, 2015) revealed that President Obama was using the nuclear negotiations with Tehran as a means of effecting a detente in US-Iranian relations a broad realignment of American power in the Middle East.
Doran's first book, Pan-Arabism before Nasser, analyzed the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as an inter-Arab conflict. His second book, Ike's Gamble, which was just released, traces the evolution in President Eisenhower's thinking about the Middle East.
He writes in major magazines and newspapers, testifies before Congress, appears on TV, and tweets - @Doranimated.
