The Middle East

Abstract

In the midst of the drama of the Cuban missile crisis Macmillan had had to break off several times from grappling with the possibility of nuclear war sparked by a dispute in the Caribbean to deal with what must have seemed the much more mundane matter of a civil war in Yemen. In fact, in the tradition of Anglo-American relations over the Middle East, the Yemeni conflict was to be the cause of much tension between London and Washington, and was to be one of the components of the crisis of interdependence that marked the winter of 1962–3. To the extent that the legacy of Anglo-American relations in the region bequeathed by Eisenhower to Kennedy was problematical this was not surprising. On the one hand, there had been the spectacular falling out over Suez in November 1956, while on the other, there had been the appearance of coordinated intervention in response to the Iraqi Revolution in July 1958. In fact, throughout Eisenhower’s two terms, there had been something of a patchwork of cooperation and conflict between the two allies, dictated by the differing order of their priorities in the region. For Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, the fight to contain communist penetration of the region occupied pride of place. Relations with local nationalists, especially the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, varied depending on current estimates of their closeness to the Soviets. The notion that Nasser could somehow be turned into a regional anti-communist warrior was an ever present, if sometimes more distant, hope. For the British Government, the need to guarantee the availability of the oil essential to the national economy dictated a concentration on the most immediate threat to such supplies. From the early part of 1956 onwards, this threat had seemed to be presented by Nasser.¹