Well, I think that’s inherent in international relations in general. There’s lots of dishonesty. There’s the old joke that an ambassador is somebody who is sent abroad by his country to lie.
What’s striking is there’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again of believing that if the United States distances itself from Israel, it’s going to get some kind of strategic benefit. There’s a whole school of thought that exists down to this day which thinks that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the center of gravity in the region and assumes just as a matter of faith that if the United States puts some daylight between Israel and itself, somehow U.S.-Arab relations will improve.
But the center of gravity in the Middle Ease is not the Arab-Israeli conflict; it’s the struggle to power among the Arabs and Muslims themselves, who are deeply divided. And that’s a lesson that Eisenhower eventually learned. He eventually thought himself out of the idea that Israel was a liability to the United States and came to the opinion that it actually was an asset. He regretted what he had done to Israel and his allies in ’56.
The Eisenhower administration, as your book documents, tried to convince Nasser to make peace with Israel in exchange for Israeli territorial concessions in the Negev. Didn’t U.S. officials realize that what bothered Arab nations was not the size of the Jewish state, but its very existence?
I think they did understand that, generally speaking. But Nasser, unlike other Arab leaders of that time, could present himself as somebody who was not breathing fire toward Israel behind the scenes. In public, though, he was. With the broadcasting equipment the United States gave him, he broadcast some of the most vitriolic propaganda against Israel. But the Americans tended to take what Nasser said behind closed doors as the truth and the stuff he was popping out with his broadcasting equipment as the lie.
So the plan – the Alpha plan, as it was called – was for the Americans to present Nasser a proposal for Egyptian-Israeli peace that Israel would absolutely detest. And it was important that Israel be seen to detest it in order for the United States to demonstrate to the Arabs that it was helping them achieve their national aspirations.
You argue in the book that many parallels exist between the 1950s and today. One of them seems to be our habit of backing the wrong people. In the 1950s, we backed Nasser; during the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya we backed radical Islamists; and currently we are partially backing the Syrian rebels, which many argue is foolish too. Considering how often we have sided with the wrong party, shouldn’t we perhaps stop picking good guys and bad guys in the Middle East, or at the very least be more humble about it?
I think the key is to be a little more humble about it. The fact of the matter is that the Middle East is going through a historical crisis, and even if we did everything right and had the wisest possible policy, there’s still going to be a lot of problems day-to-day in the Middle East. So I think the answer is humility.
