The 1957 American-Syrian Crisis: Globalist Policy in a Regional Reality

The Syrian crisis of 1957 (I will refer to it as the American-Syrian crisis) is one of those occasions where the flaws of applying a globalist analytical methodology to the Middle East-in lieu of a serious appreciation of the regional dynamics in the area-are, in retrospect, dramatically revealed. Indeed, the parameters of the crisis itself were determined as much by regional forces as they were by international actors. It was a telling irony, an indication of the policy misconceptions and misapplications surrounding the approach to the Middle East taken by the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957. What started out as a policy designed to isolate and reduce the power of Egyptian President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, that is, the Eisenhower Doctrine, was effectively abandoned during the US-Syrian crisis; thus, a modus vivendi was reached with Egypt, whose help Washington sought during the latter stages of the crisis in order to salvage the situation in Syria. Because of this rather embarrassing experience, the Eisenhower administration began to thoroughly realize that the Middle East was much more complex, not simply an area of East-West ingress