The U.S. and the Mideast

...It is no answer to that question to say that it wants peace...

...The United Nations police force has nothing decisive to contribute to the twin issues of the distribution of power and the substance of a viable settlement...

...with two men prominently involved in the negotiations leading to the settlement of the Suez crisis, one an Israeli diplomat and the other a member of the State Department...

...The third alternative is the imposition of a settlement by the United States and the Soviet Union, which will at least approximate the actual distribution of military power and will take the Middle East out of the competition of the cold war...

...In short, the United Nations police force is supposed to perform hardly any of the functions commonly associated with a police force...

...They have considered Israel a nuisance, which made it impossible for the U.S...

...Everybody wants peace if he can get it on his own terms...

...In that three-cornered configuration, the United States supported at least the first two of these groupings in order to maintain an intra-Arab balance of power, just as it tried to maintain the balance of power between the Arab states and Israel...

...The United Nations endeavored to define such a settlement which none of the parties concerned saw fit to accept on its merits...

...The only relevant question is how they have conceived the interests of the United States in the Middle East...

...Neither condition is present in the Middle East...

...More likely, it would impart to the cold war a new dimension of instability and thereby increase the risk of a general conflagration...

...In the world of the State Department, the Arab states loom infinitely larger than Israel, in terms of geographic location, economic resources, and influence upon the world balance of power...

...Even if it were to write off the Arabs as a total loss, the Soviet Union would still manifest its influence in a negative way...

...That such an outcome is in the interest of Egypt and the Soviet Union is obvious...

...A correct assessment of the Middle East situation and our position with regard to it must take into account the sharp cleavage between official pronouncements and popular sympathies, both largely favorable to Israel, and the actual policies pursued by the United States...

...To what extent the recent military disaster has reduced Egypt's ambitions remains to be seen...

...In its essence it is a polite gesture on the part of the community of nations, a diplomatic device, an elaborate make-believe through which everybody pretends, for however different reasons, not to have witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of the bankruptcy of the foreign policy of the three great leaders of the West...

...Israel had then conquered the Sinai Peninsula and was in control of the Straits of Tiran...

...It is hardly necessary to point out that the United Nations police force, as presently constituted, far from being able to impose a settlement on anybody is politically and militarily at the mercy of Egypt...

...I shall rather ask whether it is still sound today and likely to be so tomorrow...

...It strengthens the power of its implacable enemies, the Soviet Union and Egypt, and the demonstration of its weakness and lack of policy will alienate whatever good will it might have gained temporarily by its opposition to Great Britain and France among other Arab countries...

...Nasser, who, very much like Mussolini, is a clever and daring tactician but an incompetent national leader (see "Report from Cairo" by Lee Griggs in Fortune, May 1967), would then have controlled not only a large strategically located land mass but also large economic resources in the form of oil...

...foreign policy in the Middle East has operated in the past...

...But what does the United States want...

...I continued in the same article: "The great issue which the Middle East has presented to the world since the end of the Second World War has been the creation of a viable settlement which, if not acceptable to the parties concerned on its merits, could at least be enforced by unchallengeable power...

...It is obvious that neither Great Britain nor Nasser's Egypt were willing to do so any longer...

...At the moment of this writing there is no indication which of these three alternatives the United States will choose or whether it will choose any of them...

...is already doing...

...What are the terms of the United States...

...The real issue there has not been how to defend an existing status quo but how to create one that can be defended and is deemed worth defending by at least some of the parties concerned...

...The contribution of the United States to the solution of these issues has been twofold: cooperation with Egypt and the Soviet Union in the destruction of British and French power in the area, and support for a United Nations police force...

...Under the best circumstances, this policy might impose the restraints of the cold war upon the endemic warfare of the Middle East...

...They are both interested in seeing to it that the Middle East does not strike the spark that might ignite a world conflagration...

...For the main source of instability in the Middle East has been the grotesque discrepancy between the political order imposed from the outside and the actual distribution of military power...

...they may strengthen or weaken, depending upon the particular situation, the determination with which a certain policy is pursued...

...The second alternative is to allow the nations concerned to settle their conflicts on the basis of the existing distribution of military power—in other words, to allow the Middle East to find its own equilibrium...

...These two complex operations could succeed only as long as all participants were willing to abide by the rules of the game...

...I told my American friend that the United States was selling Israel down the river, as it had Great Britain and France before...

...The police are able to protect my property because all concerned know what it is and most accept the law defending it as just...

...I remember very vividly the separate conversations I had at that time Hans J. Morgenthau is Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Modern History, University of Chicago...

...This alternative is predicated upon a genuine hands-off policy on the part of the super powers, a policy not likely to be achieved in the present stage of the cold war...

...As I observed in another journal in December, 1956: "Thus it has come about that of the seven main factors of interest and power present in the Middle East?Egypt, the other Arab countries, France, Great Britain, Israel, the Soviet Union, and the United States—four have combined to destroy the power and jeopardize the interests of Great Britain and France and make Egypt and the Soviet Union the predominant powers in the area...

...and they are interested in settling the outstanding issues that might cause such a spark...

...Listening to the Security Council debate of June 6, one could not help being struck by the contrast between the purposeful political orientation of the Soviet delegate, seconded by his Bulgarian echo, and the vague and hypocritical mush of most other statements, the American one included...

...Israel has none of these assets...

...A return to the pattern of 1957, however modified, could but restore the fragility to which I pointed in 1956, and such a settlement would sooner or later dissolve again in war...

...Moral principles and legal commitments may be invoked to justify a policy arrived at on other grounds, as in the case of Vietnam...

...It is already a full-fledged member of the Russian camp, the recipient of massive economic and military aid, and the beneficiary of unqualified diplomatic support...

...It was even unable, in concert with other maritime powers, to devise a formula reasserting this principle at least in theory...

...It gave up what it gained by force of arms in exchange for the recognition of its right of free access to the Gulf of Aqaba through the Straits of Tiran...

...Out of the vague and ill-defined functions assigned to it there emerge two major purposes for its presence in Egypt: to provide a thin and fragile screen of respectability behind which Great Britain, France, and Israel can withdraw their troops from Egyptian territory, and to provide a similar screen with which to mask, on the one hand, the triumph of Egypt and the Soviet Union and, on the other, the diplomatic and military impotence of the United States...

...It has only two trumps to play: It is the strongest military power in the Middle East, and it has strong moral support in the West...

...I reminded him of the United Nations Security Council resolution of September 1, 1951, calling on Egypt to lift its embargo on Israeli shipping through the Suez canal, which Egypt simply disregarded without evoking any reaction from the members of the Security Council, either collectively or severally...

...Both interests can be satisfied only through cooperation and are likely to be jeopardized by military competition...

...for by helping to destroy the power and jeopardize the interests of Great Britain and France, the United States destroys the power of its strongest and most reliable supporters in the area and in the world at large...

...Both officials replied that the United States had committed itself unequivocally and could be relied upon to honor its commitments...

...Egypt can close the Suez canal, the Arab states can withhold their oil from the West and nationalize or even destroy Western installations, and they can move into the Russian or Chinese camp, carrying other Moslem countries with them...

...has been engaged in a typical balance-of-power policy, supporting both sides up to a point, extending economic aid to both, and presiding over a controlled armaments race—all for one purpose: to maintain the existing distribution of power and thereby preserve the territorial status quo...

...The statements of the Secretary of State were paradigms of evasive ambiguity...

...In the absence of even an approximation to a consensus about the legal order which the United Nations police force could defend, that police force would have to be of such magnitude as to be able to impose a settlement upon the parties concerned even in the face of the active opposition of most or all of them...

...One is to accept as inevitable the cold-war rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Middle East and to use Israel as the spearhead in that rivalry?that is, to do exactly what Moscow and the Arab states have, without good reason, charged the U.S...

...The emergence of the Soviet Union as a dominant power in the region using primarily Egypt and Syria for its purposes, and the failure of Great Britain, France and Israel to redress the balance has dramatically reopened the two basic issues: the substance of a viable settlement, and the distribution of power in support of it...

...The first of these contributions, as already pointed out, runs counter to the interests of the United States, since the United States is not willing to substitute effective power of its own for that of Great Britain and France...

...It can be said that in a sense the present crisis has its origins in the neglect of that fact 10 years ago...

...The fuzzy pattern of thought and action we have applied to the Middle East for 20 years, in contrast to the single-minded pursuit of its interests by the Soviet Union, makes one wonder...

...Great Britain announced that it would liquidate its position in Southern Arabia in 1968, and its control soon began to disintegrate...

...This emergence of the Soviet Union as a potent factor in the Arab camp radically changes the context within which U.S...

...As I pointed out elsewhere in March 1958: "The United States and the Soviet Union have two interests in common in the Middle East...

...The successful operation of a police force depends upon the presence of two conditions: a legally defined status quo capable of defense and deemed worth defending, and an unchallengeable preponderance of the power of the police and the law-abiding members of society over those opposed to the status quo...

...Who would enforce freedom of navigation for Israel when the chips were down...

...In any event, Egypt will no longer be uncommitted between East and West, straddling the fence and trying to extract maximum advantage from both...

...The survival of the settlement at least in a rudimentary form reposed upon a precarious balance of power between Israel and the Arab countries...

...The mood of wonderment is not relieved by the procedures of the UN Security Council, which put a premium on fuzziness and the avoidance of any simple, clear-cut political decisions...

...The fragility of the 1957 settlement has been made manifest by the events of recent weeks, and so has the persistence of the configuration of interest, power and policy from which that settlement arose...

...When President Truman recognized the State of Israel with precipitate haste, he did so not on the intrinsic merits of the case in view of U.S...

...That it is against the vital interests of the United States stands to reason...

...Consequently, the U.S...

...He would have put his Arab enemies at a hopeless disadvantage and have been on his way towards making himself the master of the Arab peninsula, looking to North and East Africa for further conquests...

...foreign interests but with an eye to the Presidential elections of 1948...

...In the light of Washington's 1957 commitments, it is significant that during the more than two weeks preceding the recent outbreak of war, the United States saw no way of enforcing the principle of free navigation through the Straits of Tiran...

...A rational discussion of the Middle Eastern crisis must start with this basic fact, however unpalatable to our moral sensibilities and law-abiding preferences...

...The discrepancy has been revealed three times in the arbitrament of war, which has twice been nullified by the imposition of a political order that took no cognizance of it...

...And what does it gain in return...

...I warned the Israeli against giving up a tangible advantage for a mere promise, to be or not to be honored according to circumstances...

...It should not be forgotten that the very creation of the State of Israel was not the result of a positive act by the West favoring such a state, but of two embarrassments which could be most conveniently eliminated by allowing it to come in existence: the breakdown of British rule due to the activities of the Israeli underground, and the existence of a couple of hundred thousand Jews whom Hitler had not gotten around to exterminating and whom nobody wanted as permanent residents...

...What the Soviet Union wants is clear: to save as much as possible of the power of the Arab states and of its own prestige among them by rolling back the Israeli armies...

...In the past, the Arab states could be divided into three groupings: those supporting Egypt, such as Syria and Iraq, those opposed to Egypt, such as Saudi Arabi and Jordan, and those controlled by Great Britain, such as the sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf...

...to pursue a straightforward policy among the Arabs...

...It is obviously impossible to be committed to the freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, and at the same time to be neutral between those who have violated that freedom and those who are trying to restore it...

...The substance of the settlement is bound to reflect this fact...

...Unable to support this settlement with unchallengeable power, the United Nations had to limit itself to pointing with regret to repeated violations of the settlement by all concerned...

...That settlement, in turn, was a result of the policies pursued by the United States...

...The war Nasser waged in Yemen was a token of his determination to move into the vacuum Great Britain will leave behind...

...The officials responsible for our Middle Eastern policy have consistently followed a pro-Arab orientation, qualified by consideration of the Jewish vote in this country...

...By dropping the Palestine question into the UN's lap, Great Britain discharged a burdensome responsibility and the West provided a piece of real estate where the ships that had sailed from port to port in search of a place to unload could finally dump their human cargo...

...The settlement of 1957 reflected this configuration of interest, power and policy...

...Ishall not raise here the question of whether that policy was sound in the past...

...The political and military vacuum created by the destruction of British and French power in the area is being filled, and for all practical purposes has already been filled, by the power of the enemies not only of Great Britain and France but of the United States as well: Egypt and the Soviet Union...

...Yet on June 5, the spokesman for the Department of State, in an unprofessional lapse from cant, made the position of the Department perfectly clear when he said that the United States was "neutral in thought, word, and deed...

...As a matter of fact, Egypt has already left that profitable but uncomfortable position...

...That it might be supported by the other Arab nations is understandable...

...On the other hand, the United States must underwrite the continuing existence of Israel as an independent state and give it the support necessary to hold its own against the Arab states...

...In the Middle East, what one nation claims as its own others claim as well, and the conceptions of justice from which the rival claims derive are irreconcilable...

...but they do not determine the choice among different courses of action...

...The emergence is primarily the result of the settlement of the Suez crisis of 1956...

...To put this expectation to the test, though, it is not necessary to raise any questions concerning the public morality of successive Administrations in Washington...

...There appear to be only three viable alternatives, which are being discussed in an ascending order of preference...

...Thus, on the one hand, the United States must protect the Arab states against Israel's superior military power by either preventing its use altogether or, if that proves impossible, by preventing its decisive use...