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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Eisenhower and Suez

Fouad Ajami cited Eisenhower’s Election Day conversation with Anthony Eden: We have given our whole thought to Hungary and the Middle East. I don’t give a damn how the election goes. Ajami lamely contrasts this with Obama’s recent remarks to Medvedev about his “last election,” but the two episodes have very little in common except […]

Fouad Ajami cited Eisenhower’s Election Day conversation with Anthony Eden:

We have given our whole thought to Hungary and the Middle East. I don’t give a damn how the election goes.

Ajami lamely contrasts this with Obama’s recent remarks to Medvedev about his “last election,” but the two episodes have very little in common except that they involve conversations between American presidents and foreign leaders and the word election comes up in both. The author of Eisenhower 1956, David Nichols, delivered a lecture last year that touched on this episode, and you can watch it here. Ajami mentions Nichols in passing, but seems not to have benefited from Nichols’ history of the crisis.

As Nichols explains, Eisenhower said this (at 35:52) in response to Eden’s inquiry about the election, which Nichols described as the “first hint of warmth” in the conversation. The conversation was otherwise dominated by their discussion of implementing the cease-fire in Egypt, which was part of Eisenhower’s ultimately successful effort to pressure Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw. Eisenhower was already on track to win his last election by a landslide, the Suez crisis erupted a little over a week before the election, and there was the danger of Soviet involvement in the conflict if the war was not quickly brought to an end. Eisenhower could politically afford not to worry about the election in the midst of this crisis, but regardless of the election’s outcome it was understandable that the result of the election wouldn’t have interested him at that moment.

Dan Trombly answers Ajami quite effectively:

Eisenhower indeed damned electoral consequences. He did so, however, in order to resist hawkish pressure that would have decreased his flexibility in negotiations and forced him into foolish, unnecessarily belligerent policies (which would have, for example, imperiled his New Look policy). For these choices, he received significant criticism from the American right. If Obama is more in need of electoral flexibility than Eisenhower, it is because critics like Ajami have attacked him viciously for his undesirably dovish foreign policy choices, and unlike Eisenhower, Obama doesn’t have his war-hero reputation to dispel or at least weather such criticism. If Obama were to apply a similarly tough line on a potential Israeli instigation of a new war in the Middle East, Ajami and other voices of the right would be viciously flaying him. If Obama cannot be as confident as Eisenhower in making relatively similar decisions for restraint, even against the preferences of close allies, it is because the space for a foreign policy of particularism and tact has been relentlessly destroyed by the political opposition.

Just imagine the howling we would hear if Obama publicly opposed the military action taken by one or more democratic states against a predominantly Muslim country ruled by an authoritarian regime. Actually, we don’t have to imagine it. Insofar as Obama has been discouraging Israel from attacking Iran this year, we have already heard it. Unlike Eisenhower, however, Obama has publicly committed himself to the same goal in Iran despite the increasingly obvious divergence of U.S. and Israeli interests on this issue.

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