The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (26 page)

The final stages of Anglo-French withdrawal occurred in the 1950s. In 1955, Britain evacuated the Suez Canal zone. In the following year, the Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco all became independent. An Egyptian decree nationalizing the canal led to an AngloFrench invasion of Egypt, preceded by a probably prearranged Israeli conquest of Sinai. This ended in some military success and total political failure. Thereafter, the retreat was rapid. Kuwait became independent in 1961; Algeria, after a long and bitter war, in 1962; the colony and protectorate of Aden, renamed South Yemen, in 1967; and, finally, the British-protected Gulf principalities, in 1971.

In retrospect, and as more evidence becomes available, it is clear that the prime motive that brought both the British and the French to the Middle East and kept them there, in the interwar period and for a little while after, was strategic: concern with the strategic and military potentialities and dangers of the region. This consideration seems to have outweighed most others. In their policies and planning, Britain and France seem to have been concerned principally with the Middle East as a buffer against enemies; as a junction, a nodal point in their own imperial communications; and as a base and a place d'armes in case of war. All these aspects were exemplified during the Second World War.

An obvious concern of both powers was the need to deny the area to others, which, they believed, would inevitably enter if the Western powers were not there to exclude them. A consideration of some importance for both the British and the French was the safeguarding of their other and more important imperial possessions. The British were much concerned with their position in India; the French, with their rule in North Africa. Both felt the need to protect these possessions from destabilizing forces, which they feared would come out of the Muslim Middle East unless the countries and peoples of that region were kept safely under imperial control, or at least under imperial influence.

Contrary to a once-popular philosophy, there was little concern for economic motives, nor was there any expectation of economic gain. The main preoccupation of both imperial powers seems, rather, to have been the economic costs-that is, the expense of achieving the strategic and political gains that were desired. Both powers were always anxious to keep this cost as low as possible. It was only toward the end of the period of Anglo-French domination that oil emerged as a significant economic-as distinct from strategic-factor, and even then it was by no means as important as it subsequently became.

The position of both powers had several basic weaknesses. They were unwilling to incur costs to maintain their hold and reluctant to use force to overcome opposition. In both countries, there was hesitancy, uncertainty, and weakness. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed about whether the whole enterprise was feasible or worthwhile. Even Winston Churchill is recorded as having wondered on one occasion whether it would not be better to "give the whole place back to the Turks."

The thought has occurred to others on subsequent occasions, though not to the Turks, who then, as later, would certainly have been unwilling to accept any such gift. One of the clearest and most frequently reiterated themes in the political thinking of the Turkish republic is the renunciation of any kind of territorial expansion outside what are defined as the Turkish national boundaries. There were some questions as to where precisely these boundaries were, but these were border questions involving Turkish populationsMosul, Alexandretta, later Cyprus-and certainly did not involve any desire whatever for the reconstitution of the Ottoman Empire or the recovery of its lost territories.

As the Anglo-French position in the Middle East grew weaker, it was confronted by new hostile forces, nations and regimes still possessing that special mixture of greed, smugness, and ruthlessness that is the essential ingredient of the imperial mood and that among the British and French had given way to weariness, satiety, and selfdoubt.

The decisive influence of outside powers and their rivalries neither began nor ended with the Anglo-French domination. In a sense, it lasted for almost two centuries, beginning with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte toward the end of the eighteenth century and ending with the cessation of the Cold War in the Middle East in last decades of the twentieth.

The foreign policy of Israel has gone through several phases, affected more by the developing situation in the region and the world than by internal political changes. From the start, Israel clearly had far less room for maneuver than did any of its neighbors. The new state had to take account of the situation of the Jewish communities in other parts of the world, which in the late 1940s and early 1950s was still very precarious; of the implacable enmity of the Arab states and to some degree also of other Muslim states; and of the generally unfriendly attitude of the Soviet Union and of its satellites and dependencies in Europe and elsewhere. Both government and people were always aware of the terrible penalties for miscalculation, greater than for any other country in the world. The basic objective of Israeli foreign policy was survival in a hostile environment. Discussion turned only on how to achieve that end. There was general agreement that this purpose was best served by a pro-Western policy, more specifically, a pro-American policy. Indeed, the active hostility of the Soviet Union and the cold detachment of most of Western Europe left Israeli policymakers no real alternative. This policy was confirmed when from the 1960s the United States, alarmed by the growth and spread of Soviet influence in the Arab lands, began to see strategic value in the Israeli connection.

To supplement this basic policy of Western alignment, the Israelis made a determined effort to cultivate good relations with states on the far side of the Arab world-Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia nd other African states. Their successful pursuit of this policy was the more remarkable in that all these states were linked to the Arab world by Islamic or African ties and associations. Israel's diplomatic relations with Turkey were established at a very early date. Subsequently, they were for a number of years reduced to a minimal level, but were not broken off and were later fully restored. Relations with Iran were never officially established or publicly admitted, but were at one time very close in a number of fields. They were decisively ended with the overthrow of the shah and his regime. The Islamic republic has pursued a policy of uncompromising enmity to Israel. It has, indeed, gone further than have the Arab states directly involved, since most of these have now reduced their public demands to an Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967.

In Africa, a number of states broke off or downgraded their diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 war. Most of these were subsequently restored. A parallel Israeli policy, of cultivating alliances, or at least contacts, with non-Arab or non-Muslim groups in Arab countries-the Kurds in northern Iraq, the blacks in southern Sudan, the Maronite Christians in Lebanon-was much less successful and appears to have been for the most part abandoned.

Thereafter, the Israeli position in international relations was transformed by two major developments, one regional and the other global. The first of these was the signature, in Washington, on 26 March 1979, of a treaty of peace between Israel and Egypt. This success was achieved by long and patient diplomacy on the part of several states. The process began with secret meetings between Egyptian and Israeli emissaries in Morocco and Romania, at which certain assurances appear to have been exchanged. It became dramatically public on 19 November 1977, when Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, addressed the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem. The final stages were negotiated at Camp David with considerable help from the United States. The treaty has proved remarkably strong. Despite pessimistic predictions, it survived the assassination of President Sadat, the completion of the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, and, most notably, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

The second major change was the ending of the Cold War, by which the position of Israel, as of every other state in the region, was fundamentally transformed. The immediate consequences for Israel were beneficial: Israel's most implacable enemies in the region were weakened by the disappearance of their Soviet patron, while a number of more distant states in eastern Europe and in Asia, previously hostile, unfriendly, or indifferent, hastened to establish diplomatic relations.

Turkey and Iran are old sovereign states with a habit of taking responsibility for their own survival and welfare. For them, national independence has been an accepted fact, an axiom of political life, in no need of assertion or demonstration. Although their independence has on occasion been threatened, it has never been lost, and their political thinking, with rare exceptions, has consequently not been bedeviled by the problem of foreign rule and the struggle to end it. Their foreign policies, developed through practical experience over a long period, are directed toward the attainment of limited and definable national purposes and are based on a normal mixture of tradition and calculation. Both countries have grave, though different, internal problems and have endured major political changes. It is remarkable, however, that in Turkey, these changes had little discernible effect on foreign policy, which continued to be determined by the basic facts of Turkey's international position and predicament rather than by the changing moods of internal politics.

For centuries, the strategic imperative for Turkey and, indeed, more broadly, for the Turkic peoples was defense against Russia: the need to delay and, if possible, to halt the advance of Russian power southward and eastward into the Turkic lands. The longdrawn-out Turkish rearguard action achieved only limited success, and by the twentieth century, vast lands and many Turkic peoples had become part of the Russian Empire, later the Soviet Union.

In this situation, it was natural for the Turks to look westward for help. In 1914 and again in 1941, the Turks faced an agonizing dilemma when their Western potential allies were themselves allied with their Russian enemies. In the First World War, they chose the Central Powers and shared their defeat, suffering in addition the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. In the Second World War, this time more attracted to the West and more repelled by the Axis, the Turkish republic adopted an increasingly pro-Western neutrality, ending with a formal declaration of war on the Axis powers in 1945.

The coming of the Cold War resolved Turkey's dilemma and offered it a new international alignment that satisfied both its cultural and political aspirations and its fundamental strategic needs. From the start, Turkey was a charter member of the Western democratic alliance, with a vital role in the strategic defense of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. The ending of the Cold War seemed for a while to have ended this role, but has in its place given the Turkish republic a new importance as a bridge between the democratic West on one side and the Turkic, perhaps even the Islamic, worlds on the other.

The international position of Iran, the other old established sovereign power of the Middle East, is in some ways like-but in many ways unlike-that of Turkey. For centuries, the Ottoman and Persian empires had contended for the domination of the Middle East and had fought many wars against each other. By the nineteenth century, both Middle Eastern powers were overshadowed by the rising empires of Europe, and their old rivalries ceased to matter. The last of the long series of Turco-Persian wars ended in 1823, after which the two neighboring states managed to maintain correct, though rarely cordial, relations.

Both were in a sense victims of the same forces and confronted the same problems, but with significant differences. Iran, like Turkey, was threatened from the north and had been compelled to cede important territories and populations to the Russian Empire. But Iran, unlike Turkey, was keenly and directly aware of a parallel threat from the south, from the British Empire in India, which, while not seeking territorial acquisitions from Iran, nevertheless aimed at political and economic penetration of the country. For Iranian statesmen, the best chance of survival was to play their northern and southern enemies off against each other and to secure what advantage they could from this rivalry.

The ending of the British Empire removed one of the two absolutes that had governed Iranian foreign policy and left the country in dangerous isolation under the threat of a resurgent and now immensely powerful Soviet Union. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russians had occupied and annexed the northern part of the Iranian province of Azerbaijan. At the end of the Second World War, they were in occupation of the remainder of Azerbaijan, where they set up a "people's republic," apparently with the intention of turning it into a Soviet satellite like the people's democracies of eastern Europe. By a combination of skillful Iranian diplomacy and powerful outside support, the Soviets were persuaded to withdraw their troops and to allow the reincorporation of southern-though not, of course, northern-Azerbaijan into the Iranian realm. The outside support came from the United States, which the rulers of Iran came to perceive as the successor of the departed British Empire in the balancing act of Iranian foreign policy. As Soviet power grew and became more menacing, the shah-also facing serious internal problems-relied increasingly on American support.

These internal problems illustrate one of the main differences between Turkey and Iran. The Turks had been in contact with Europe and with Europeans for centuries and had an easy familiarity with European ways without parallel in the geographically less accessible and culturally more traditional land of Iran. The Turks, in a series of changes, of which the successful revolution of Kemal AtatUrk was the most important though not the first, had made a conscious choice for European culture, European society, and a European political system. The Turkish involvement first in the Council of Europe and then with the European Community represents the later phases of a continuing-even if sometimes contestedprocess. The Iranians, despite the growth of a Western-educated professional and administrative middle class, had made no such choice, and their modernizing reforms, though important and farreaching, were in the main limited to the material aspects of Westernization.