THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE: How It Was Born & What It Can Do

In the long weeks of political debate, the Eisenhower Doctrine was wrenched into so many debatable pieces that the U.S. all but lost sight of the remarkable meaning of the whole. From Washington TIME’S Diplomatic Correspondent John Beal this week explained this meaning in the first story of how the doctrine evolved from scratchpad to policy:

IN Key West, Fla. last December, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was convalescing from his operation for intestinal cancer. It was some convalescence. Each day at 10 a.m. he was on the phone to the President and the State Department, keeping abreast of the Suez crisis and the U.S. efforts to keep the Russian “volunteers” out of the Middle East. At 11 o’clock he would knock off to lie on the beach or go fishing; after lunch he would take a nap or go fishing some more. Each evening before dinner Dulles would invite his one Key West assistant, John Hanes Jr., 32, and his wife Lucy, and perhaps his doctor, to his quarters for cocktails (a rye on the rocks for the Secretary), and there the Middle East would dominate the conversation. One day Dulles got out his yellow scratchpad and pencil and wrote out a draft of what he called “A United States Declaration on the Middle East.” But his thoughts had not jelled, and he tore up the declaration without having it typed.

The Advancing Concepts. After four postoperative weeks Dulles returned from Key West, flew a few days later to the Dec. 11 meeting of the NATO Council in Paris. There, separately, the British and French Foreign Ministers told him that the U.S.’s principal job was to make its presence felt in the Middle East. Dulles assured them both that a way would be found to do it. The objective: developing a long range U.S. initiative to fill the post-Suez power deficit and to work toward an enduring stability.

Back in Washington, he reviewed several alternative plans prepared by the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Three of these alternatives were: 1) U.S. adherence to the Baghdad Pact, which links the Northern Tier nations of Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Turkey to Britain; 2) U.S. proposal of a “Middle East Charter” that would invite the area nations to subscribe to a statement of social and economic betterment for their peoples, with no reference to military considerations; 3) bilateral treaties between the U.S. and individual Arab states. Out of these policy papers Dulles borrowed some ideas, junked a great many more, then evolved with the President what the U.S. press—not Eisenhower, not Dulles—at once began to call the Eisenhower Doctrine.

One complicating factor for the State Department was Eisenhower’s post-Korea policy, expressed during the 1955 Formosa crisis, of getting prior congressional approval for the use of U.S. forces. Once again Ike was adamant: it was essential to get congressional approval in advance for the use, if necessary, of the U.S. deterrent power in the Middle East. So after Ike and Dulles won a National Security Council O.K. for the doctrine, Ike went before a joint session of Congress to 1) request standing authority to use U.S. armed forces to help protect any Middle Eastern nation requesting help against aggression from “any nation controlled by international Communism,” and 2) spend $200 million in the area in stability-making foreign economic aid.

Tke Projection of Power. The Eisenhower Doctrine was old and also new. It was old in the sense that it hewed (as the Truman Doctrine for Greece did) to the sustained U.S. objective of seeking an area-wide, indigenous capability of self-defense and an insulation of the area’s disputes against embroiling the rest of the world. It was new in that it projected the factor of U.S. power into a defense of the area. ,It was also new in its attempt to provide economic flexibility ‘in achieving another sustained U.S. objective for the area—the raising of its economic level.

The features which recommended this policy to the Administration were:

∙ It is bilateral (a point advocated strongly by Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy); it extends the U.S. offer of protection to individual Mideast nations, but only at their request; it does not require organization of the whole region to be effective.

∙ Although it is designed principally to preserve the vast stretches of Arab territory from Communism, it also applies to the Arabs’ sworn enemy, tiny Israel, without taking sides.

∙ It is informal; neither the requesting nation nor the U.S. has to sign a new pact, and sensitive nationalists are not required to line up on the U.S. side.

∙ It is exclusively American and noncolonial. The U.S. is no longer coupled rigidly or identified in the Middle East with Britain and France—and yet the doctrine in no way excludes them but, in fact, helps to preserve a Western influence behind which the British and French may rebuild.