The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Lebanon Crisis: America's New Role in the Middle East

The Suez Crisis had drastically shifted the pieces on the Middle Eastern chessboard. Following this crisis, the US realized that the image of traditional Western colonial powers like Britain and France in the Arab world was completely shattered, and Soviet Russia (USSR) was rapidly filling this void, increasing its prestige.

America’s Middle East Shield: The Eisenhower Doctrine (1957)

To halt this trend, US President Eisenhower sent a historic message to the US Congress on January 5, 1957. In this message, Eisenhower stated that after the Suez Crisis, the USSR was close to dominating the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern oil resources, the lifeblood of the West, thereby bringing the region under political control and dealing a fatal blow to the Western Bloc.

With this move, which would go down in history as the Eisenhower Doctrine, the President requested authorization to provide direct economic and military aid to Middle Eastern countries, to use US armed forces directly if these countries faced an attack from communist nations, and to spend $200 million annually for this purpose.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

How did it differ from the Truman Doctrine? Although the US first showed its interest in the Middle Eastern borders with the Truman Doctrine, that was a narrowly framed plan limited only to Türkiye and Greece, primarily envisioning “military aid.” In contrast, the Eisenhower Doctrine encompassed the entire Middle Eastern region and, most importantly, guaranteed that these countries would be defended against communism personally by the US, under the condition of “the actual use of American troops when necessary.” 

Through this doctrine, the US completely filled the power vacuum left by Britain and France (following the Suez fiasco) and stepped up against the USSR as the new protector of the Middle East. However, the doctrine split the Arab world in two: while Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Türkiye, Greece, Afghanistan, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco supported the plan; Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, swept by nationalist winds, reacted strongly against it.

The Doctrine’s First Test: The Lebanon Crisis (1958) The first major crisis where the Eisenhower Doctrine was put to the test erupted shortly after. During the 1957 general elections in Lebanon, pro-Western President Camille Chamoun rigged the elections to install a parliament that would extend his term for another 4 years, and on top of that, he accepted the Eisenhower Doctrine. This created a massive political crisis in the country. With the country on the brink of civil war, President Chamoun immediately appealed to the US, Britain, and France, claiming that everything happening was the result of “foreign intervention” (specifically by neighbouring Syria, and indirectly the USSR/Egypt alliance), and requested urgent military aid for Lebanon. The US, initially reluctant to engage in direct military intervention, changed its mind when the balance in the region suddenly turned upside down. The bloody coup in Iraq that toppled the pro-Western monarchy and heavily damaged the Baghdad Pact, the Western shield in the Middle East, threw the US into a panic. Consequently, the US invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine and landed exactly 15,000 American troops in Lebanon. Under the show of force by the American navy and troops, coupled with diplomatic pressure, President Chamoun agreed to drop his bid to extend his term. The crisis subsided when the Chief of Staff, Fuad Chehab, who was respected by all factions, was elected as the new president by the Lebanese parliament. U.S. Marine sits in a foxhole and points a machine gun towards Beirut, Lebanon With this, we have concluded that first decade which drew the borders of the Middle East in blood: the establishment of Israel, the devastating toll of the Arab-Israeli wars, the imperialist debacle at Suez, and the Eisenhower Doctrine, which marked direct US military intervention in the region. We saw step-by-step how the unending fire between Israel and Palestine was first stoked, and how Iran, attempting to claim its own oil, was silenced by a coup. Our new series: Developments in the Far East.

Black Gold and the Suez Crisis: Oil, Nasser, and the End of British Power in the Middle East

In the previous blog, we looked at the Arab-Israeli conflicts, a struggle rooted one hundred years ago that continues to bleed the Middle East today. Now we turn to the subject that has been behind the greatest imperial interventions and coups of the 20th century: black gold. Oil.

From the early 1900s, the right to extract and process Iranian oil had been held by a massive British monopoly, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), the predecessor of the oil giant now known as BP (British Petroleum). This arrangement was renewed through a new agreement in 1933.

After the Second World War, as Britain lost much of its global empire and its power began to fade, the Iranian people were receiving almost nothing from the enormous wealth flowing out of their own land. The Iranian government initially asked for a revision of the agreement, a modest increase in the share being paid to Iran by the company.

But Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the visionary leader of the nationalist front in the Iranian parliament, firmly rejected these surface-level compromises. His vision was far more radical: the immediate nationalisation of Iranian oil and the complete removal of foreign monopoly control. Backed by overwhelming public support, Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister of Iran on 28 April 1951, and his very first act was to announce to the world the official nationalisation of Iranian oil. For Britain, this was nothing less than the cutting of its economic lifeline in the Middle East.

25 July 1952 issue of the Tehran Mosavvar: "Iran has won", featuring Mosaddegh and Churchill.

The Suez Crisis

Before we get into the Suez Crisis, I want to share a small personal note. During my undergraduate studies, I read a play about the British Empire and its then Prime Minister Anthony Eden. The Suez Canal crisis and Gamal Abdel Nasser both appeared in that text. At the time, I only had a surface-level understanding of the events. Now, we are about to see the full picture.

On 23 July 1952, a military coup carried out by the Free Officers Movement brought Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in Egypt. Once in office, Nasser worked toward two ambitious goals: the creation of a collective security pact among Arab states, an Arab Union, and the building of a broader solidarity under the umbrella of Islam.

But Nasser’s larger vision went even further. He wanted to form a Third Bloc a new power block positioned between the Eastern and Western blocs of the Cold War. However, the establishment of the Baghdad Pact disrupted his plans entirely.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the foundation ceremony of the Aswan High Dam.

When the US and the World Bank refused to fund the Aswan Dam project, Nasser responded by nationalising the Suez Canal. In 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, which was under British-French joint ownership. Following this, America, Britain, and France made numerous attempts to remove Suez from Egyptian control but were unsuccessful.

Upon Nasser's rejection of the proposal to leave the canal under international control, Britain, France, and Israel came together and prepared a plan to seize the canal. (This is the event that was the subject of the theatrical play I mentioned earlier; the play drew its reference from here.) According to this plan, Israel would attack Egypt; Britain and France would then deploy troops to the region under the pretext of ending the war, and subsequently take over the canal. In accordance with this plan, Israel launched an attack against Egypt on October 29, 1956.

Following their ultimatum to the parties to “end the conflict,” Britain and France began deploying troops to the region via the Mediterranean. USSR Premier Nikolai Bulganin sent a message to US President Eisenhower, requesting that the US and the USSR send a joint force to Egypt to stop the war, stating that otherwise, this could lead to World War III. However, the US strongly opposed the joint force proposal and declared that it would take the necessary measures if the Soviets sent troops to Egypt.

The US Government and public did not accept this attack initiated by Britain and France. Indeed, the US reaction was harsh; it issued a stern warning to Britain, France, and Israel, demanding their withdrawal from Egyptian territory. These states were forced to withdraw from Egypt. The Suez Canal was subsequently cleared and reopened to global maritime traffic in March 1957. The most important consequence of the 1956 Suez Crisis was that while the aim was to eliminate Soviet Russia's prestige and influence in the Middle East, it actually increased them even further.

The Birth of Israel and the First Arab-Israeli War: A History of Palestine

To understand the roots of the tragic events unfolding in Palestine today, events that have reached the scale of a genocide, we need to turn the pages of history back almost one hundred years. This is a vast and heavy subject. To make sense of the modern face of the Middle East and its deepest breaking points, we will examine it in three main sections:

Part 1: The Establishment of Israel and the 1948–1949 Arab-Israeli War

Part 2: The Britain-Iran Oil Dispute and the Suez Crisis

Part 3: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Lebanon Crisis

I pray for all those who have lost their lives in this ongoing tragedy. My only wish is for the wars to stop. Peace at home, peace in the world.

Herzl (seated in the middle) with members of the Zionist Organization in Vienna, 1896

The movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, known ideologically as Zionism, took shape in the 1880s, largely as a response to the violent persecution of Jewish communities in Russia, known as pogroms. Facing extreme pressure and violence, large numbers of Russian Jews were forced to migrate to Palestine, marking the first practical steps of this movement. Zionism gained significant political momentum in 1896, when a Budapest-born Jewish journalist, Dr. Theodor Herzl, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), a work that effectively became the manifesto of the Zionist movement.

Before turning to the international stage, Herzl made a direct approach to Sultan Abdülhamid II of the Ottoman Empire. He visited Istanbul and requested land in Palestine for the establishment of a Jewish state, offering to help manage Ottoman debts in return. The Sultan firmly rejected this proposal. However, the Ottoman side indicated that if Herzl could successfully negotiate with European powers to, reduce the interest on Ottoman debts, they might permit Jewish settlement, but only in what is today northern Iraq, and exclusively for Jewish communities. Herzl was unable to fulfil this condition and left Istanbul without an agreement.

Turning his efforts elsewhere, Herzl founded the World Zionist Organization in 1897, shifting the movement’s strategy toward seeking direct diplomatic recognition for a Jewish state in Palestine. A key turning point came when US President Woodrow Wilson was brought on side with the Zionist cause, a development that pushed Britain to adopt an increasingly sympathetic and supportive stance toward the movement as well.

 

The Balfour Declaration

The most important diplomatic step on the road to the establishment of Israel was taken on 2 November 1917, with the Balfour Declaration. British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour sent an official letter to Lord Rothschild, one of the leaders of the international Zionist movement, formally committing the British Government to supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

But why did Britain agree to this? In the darkest days of the First World War, Britain had two clear goals. First, it wanted to bring the support of the global Jewish diaspora, particularly powerful figures in the United States and Russia, into the war effort. Second, it aimed to create a loyal and strategically placed buffer zone in the heart of the Middle East, one that would help secure the Suez Canal.

Conflicts Under the British Mandate and the UN Process

After the Second World War, British forces in Palestine struggled to stop the large waves of illegal Jewish immigration organised by the underground network known as Haganah. This situation led to violent clashes between British forces and Irgun, a radical Zionist armed group. Having completely lost control of the region, Britain handed the matter over to the United Nations on 2 April 1947.

The UN General Assembly established the UN Palestine Commission to find a solution. After examining the situation on the ground, the commission unanimously agreed on the principle of independence, but was divided on what form it should take:

UN Majority Plan (supported by Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, and others): Palestine should be partitioned into two separate independent states for Arabs and Jews, with Jerusalem placed under full international status.

UN Minority Plan (supported by India, Yugoslavia, and Iran): Palestine should become a single federal state, made up of both Jewish and Arab entities.

On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Majority Plan, the Partition Plan. However, since the plan proposed giving a disproportionate share of the land to the Jewish minority, it was met with widespread outrage across the Arab world. At a meeting in Cairo on 17 December 1947, Arab states made the decision to go to war to prevent the partition from taking place.

Egyptian forces crossing the Suez Canal on 7 October 1973

The Declaration of the State and the First Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949)

Exactly one day before the British withdrawal was finalized, the establishment of the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. The very next day, Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq), rejecting the partition plan and Israel's creation, declared war on Israel.

The war rapidly evolved into a multi-front struggle for survival: Egypt in the south, Jordan and Iraq in the east, and Syria and Lebanon in the north. Although Arab armies (particularly Jordan's Arab Legion) made initial advances around Jerusalem in the early weeks, deep mistrust, command crises, and a lack of coordination among the Arab states crippled their progress. Conversely, Israel utilized the UN-brokered ceasefires much more strategically; during these pauses, Israel rapidly modernized and expanded its military with massive Western arms shipments (notably smuggled via Czechoslovakia). Launching fierce, synchronized counter-offensives after the truces, Israel routed the Arab armies, concluding the war with a decisive military victory and expanding its borders through UN armistice agreements (Rhodes, Rasen Nakura, Manahayim).

The Nakba (The Catastrophe)

During and after the war, driven by the violence, systematic terror, and massacres (such as the Deir Yassin massacre) perpetrated by Israeli paramilitary groups, over 700,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, villages, and homeland, becoming refugees. This massive ethnic cleansing, during which hundreds of Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and people were uprooted at gunpoint, is seared into Palestinian memory as the “Nakba” (The Catastrophe). While Israel expanded its territory to 75%, this very Nakba remains the crucible of the endless refugee crisis and the genocidal massacres witnessed in Gaza and the West Bank today.

The Consequences of the 1948–1949 Arab-Israeli War

The war left deep and lasting marks on the entire Middle East. Its consequences shaped the political landscape of the region for decades to come. Egypt, widely believed to have the strongest army among the Arab states, suffered one of the heaviest defeats in the war. This humiliation weakened the monarchy of King Farouk and created the conditions for its eventual collapse.

The defeat of five Arab armies at the hands of a small Israeli force had a powerful effect across the Arab world. It strengthened feelings of nationalism and gave significant momentum to a growing Arab Nationalist movement. The absence of a formal peace treaty at the end of the war left the conflict unresolved and laid the groundwork for future Arab-Israeli wars.

The weakening of King Farouk's regime following the war eventually led to the fall of the Egyptian monarchy and the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Once in office, Nasser sought to position himself as the leader of Arab nationalism across the region.

Finally, on 25 May 1950, the United States, Britain, and France issued a joint declaration stating that they would sell weapons to Arab states and Israel only in quantities necessary for internal security, and only on the condition that those weapons would not be used against another state.

Without slowing down, we move straight into Part 2, and into the subject that lies at the heart of so much of what we see in the Middle East today: oil.

Part 2: The Britain-Iran Oil Dispute

World War I: How It Reshaped the Middle East

In our previous blog, we explored how the Soviet Union reshaped Central Asia with artificial borders and strict assimilation policies. However, they were not the only ones drawing lines on a map. At the exact same time, Western imperial powers were executing a similar “divide and rule” strategy in the Middle East.

Today, to understand the endless conflicts, border disputes, and political crises we see on the news every day, we must look back to the aftermath of World War I. The Middle East we know today was not formed by natural historical progression, but by the pens and rulers of European diplomats. 

Generated by AI

During the depressed days of World War I, Britain, France, and Tsarist Russia had already drawn the map of the Middle East behind closed doors. They divided the region among themselves through secret treaties (especially the Sykes-Picot Agreement). However, an unexpected storm broke out: Russia withdrew from the war due to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The new Soviet government created a massive diplomatic crisis by exposing these secret imperialist plans to the whole world.

When US President Woodrow Wilson published his Fourteen Points (which explicitly opposed colonialism), the perfect plans of Britain and France took a heavy blow.

The San Remo Conference

However, these obstacles were not enough to stop the Western powers. The USA, disappointed by European politics, returned to its famous Monroe Doctrine (Policy of Isolation). This massive shift left the Middle Eastern stage entirely to Britain and France. Breathing a sigh of relief without the pressure of the USA, these two powers found a new disguise to achieve their goals: The Mandate System. Consequently, at the San Remo Conference in 1920, this new version of colonialism was formalized. They reached a strict consensus to officially divide the Middle Eastern territories under mandate regimes.

After the resolution on 25 April 1920, standing outside Villa Devachan, from left to right: Matsui, Lloyd George, Curzon, Berthelot, Millerand, Vittorio Scialoja, and Nitti. Enhanced by AI

Middle East Map

According to the official excuse of the League of Nations, some regions were not yet capable of “governing themselves” or “protecting their lands from attacks.” Therefore, it was argued that these nations should be managed by a “developed” state until they reached a certain level of maturity.

By the early 1920s, the Middle East was divided between two major imperial powers:

• France: Took Syria and Lebanon under its mandate. It also strengthened its control over Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa.
• Britain: To protect its trade routes to India and secure oil fields, it brought Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, and Kuwait into its mandate system. It also took strategic points in the Arabian Peninsula under its protection.

It was an announcement that the future of millions of people would be decided by others.

Emir Faisal's party at Versailles, during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri al-Said, Prince Faisal (front), Captain Pisani (rear), Lawrence, Faisal's servant (name unknown), Captain Hassan Khadri

Empty Promises and the Spark of Resistance in Egypt

While Britain and France were dividing the Middle East on paper, they needed to soften the inevitable anger of the local people. To do this, they issued a joint declaration on November 7, 1918, promising Arab nations the right to “establish their own democratic governments.” However, it soon became clear that these promises were nothing more than a stalling tactic.

The first major crack in this colonial system appeared in Egypt. Britain's attempt to establish total dominance clashed heavily with Egyptian nationalists. The Wafd Party, founded by Saad Zaghloul in early 1919, led a massive resistance movement, organizing strikes and protests throughout the country. Britain tried to extinguish this fire by exiling Zaghloul and other leaders, but this move backfired and only fueled the public's anger.

Stepping Back: The Winds of Independence

Faced with a growing and unstoppable crisis, Britain was forced to declare Egypt's independence with a declaration on February 28, 1922. The ruler of the time, Khedive Fuad I, accepted this declaration and took the title of King (Melik). At the end of this long struggle, Egypt completely abolished capitulations in 1937 and became a member of the League of Nations.

It wasn't just Britain; France also had to bow to the resistance in the region. Due to increasing nationalist pressures, France was forced to sign treaties paving the way for independence for Syria in 1930 and Lebanon in 1936.

The Middle East we know today was manufactured in European conference rooms. Sykes-Picot, San Remo different names for the same ambition. However, the wounds never healed. In our next post, we turn eastward to Japan, and the Meiji Restoration.