1958 Middle East Crisis

23 July

King Faisal II of Iraq with US President Truman. Image from the Truman Library.

On this day, 23 July 1958, Prime Minister Robert Menzies delivers a national radio broadcast in response to a burgeoning crisis in the Middle East which threatened to precipitate the onset of World War III. The event would mark the advent of American military intervention in the region, which has since lasted many decades and drawn Australia into three military conflicts.

While the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is generally remembered as the Cold War moment in which the Democratic West came closest to a full-scale confrontation with the Soviet Union and its allies, there were several other, less remembered moments in which the fate of the world sat on a knife’s edge. One such moment was the series of political disturbances which proceeded with rapid procession through much of the Middle East in July 1958.

The crisis began in Iraq, where the pro-Western King Faisal II was murdered in a violent coup on 14 July. It quickly spread to Jordan, where President Eisenhower warned of a ‘highly organized plot to overthrow the lawful government’ of King Hussein, and Lebanon, which was plunged into a civil war. The disturbances were tied to an Arab nationalist movement, which was spearheaded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had already demonstrated expansionary aims by uniting Egypt with Syria as the ‘United Arab Republic’. However, they were fully backed by the USSR, which appeared to Western observers to be trying to seize control of the region in the same manner in which it had plunged Eastern Europe behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, and which at the very least would be the direct beneficiary if Nasser obtained a hegemony.

While the United States had strongly opposed British and French intervention in Egypt aimed and preventing Nasser from nationalising the Suez Canal just two years prior (leading to much embarrassment for Menzies who directly involved himself in the episode), the clearer Cold War underpinnings of this new crisis prompted America to completely invert its response. When the governments of both Jordan and Lebanon asked for American military assistance, it was rapidly forthcoming - by the afternoon of 15 July, 1,700 U.S. Marines had stormed the beaches of Beirut. They would be followed by British paratroopers who landed in Jordan’s capital of Amman.

Though the conflict was too distant and would luckily prove too brief to necessitate any Australian commitment of troops, the nation watched events with baited breadth, while Menzies gave our ‘great and powerful friends’ his full diplomatic and oratorical backing:

‘We think that Great Britain and the United States of America have behaved with complete propriety. We go further, and say that they could not have abandoned Lebanon and Jordan without the most grievous consequences for the whole of the free world. They responded to calls for help from the lawful governments of Lebanon and Jordan. Legally, they were entitled to do so. Morally, they would have destroyed the value of their friendship with these nations if they had refused.

The government of Lebanon and that of Jordan are each lawful and regular. The Soviet Union and its friends are fond of representing revolutionary elements in such countries, elements which are in many cases no more than the hired agents of outside powers, as possessing a true democratic quality. This is indeed odd. The Government of Egypt (and now, with Syria thrown in, the United Arabic Republic) is one of military dictatorship. Nasser himself came to power by an armed coup, and is subject to the effective votes of no electors. The Soviet Union is a dictatorship supported by a non-elected party; parliamentary government, as we know it, is simply non-existent...

The Soviet Union has been providing arms and military equipment to Egypt and Syria. That this was associated with political arrangements is made clear by the direct and public association of Moscow and Nasser. The bloody and violent actions in the Middle East have been fomented, by every instrument of propaganda, by the Soviet Union on the one hand and President Nasser on the other...

If we believe in our free civilisation we can neither abandon it, nor put it at unnecessary risk, nor connive, in a supine way, at accepting a division in the world in which the enemies of that civilisation grow in strength, add to their satellites, and reduce into colonial servitude more and more countries whose capacity for genuine self-government both the British Commonwealth and the United States of America have been at great pains to encourage and assist’.

1958 Middle East Crisis

James Menzies

Jefferson Oration