Abstract

Doctrine for Mideast Disaster

As the dust of battle clears and we start adding up the debits and credits of the Suez war, some queer and disturbing perspectives open out. Suez, according to the article author, was a defeat for the U.S., as well as for England and France-not a defeat in terms of military power, but a defeat in the battle of ideas which goes so much deeper and in the end is decisive. By exposing the ugly skeletons in the Western cupboard, England and France had forced the U.S. to reformulate the whole basis of American policy. For a time American attitudes fostered this belief. The world-wide disillusionment that followed the enunciation of the plan of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was due not merely to its tactical shortcomings in the sense that it was likely to produce results the very opposite of those intended.