In Ike's Gamble: America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, Michael Doran argues that President Dwight “Eisenhower saw the United States as an honest broker—a mediator helping nationalists seek fair redress from the British” (p. 9). Doran further maintains that Eisenhower's policy of backing President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt backfired spectacularly. He writes, “Nasser used the American fixation on peacemaking as a means of deflecting the attention of Washington from his revolutionary pan-Arab program, which screamed about Zionism and imperialism, but which also sought to eliminate Arab rivals to regional leadership” (p. 11). Instead of creating a stable anti-Communist Arab world, Eisenhower's gamble on Nasser strengthened the hand of the Soviet Union and created even greater turbulence in the Middle East.
Doran does a superb job describing the negotiations of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1954, which removed British troops from the Canal Zone. Prime Minister Winston...