All these trends were underpinned by a growing demand for inputs of energy and raw materials. Internationalization—because it was premised upon globally oriented production circuits—demanded large increases in energy use. And here, too, there was a shift—away from the centuries-old use of coal—toward oil, and later natural gas, as the principal sources of energy. Oil had become, in the words of Simon Bromley, a “strategic commodity.”3 Its greater energy density and portability (relative to coal) made it ideal for powering automobiles, airplanes, and modern militaries.4 Not only did these hydrocarbons supply the necessary energy for industrial production and transportation, they also formed the basic feedstock for the vast array of products generated in the new petrochemical industries.
Through the first few decades of the twentieth century, the bulk of the world’s oil production had been located in Europe and the United States. But following a wave of discoveries during the 1920s and 1930s, it became clear that the Gulf region of the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and the smaller Gulf states—held the world’s largest supplies of cheap and easily accessible hydrocarbons. This brought with it profound geopolitical consequences, conferring on the region a potentially decisive role in determining the fortunes of capitalism at the global scale—“a stupendous source of strategic power,” as a US Department of State memo described Saudi Arabia in 1945.5
But concurrent with this transformation in the nature of capitalist production were sweeping changes to the Middle East state system. The existing nation-state borders were largely a result of British and French machinations, which had divided the region into various colonies and assorted protectorates in the early twentieth century alongside the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. World War II, however, had significantly disrupted these old colonial structures. A deep-seated yearning for independence had been percolating for decades and—with the weakening of British and French hegemony during and after the war—a resurgence of anticolonial struggles shook the established patterns of rule. Squeezed by mounting financial and political crises at home, the former colonial powers were faced with burgeoning movements demanding control over their natural resources and strategic transport routes, and the right to freely determine relations with other countries. The increasing intensity of these struggles raised the specter of popular sovereignty and national independence over what had arguably become the most important zone in the world market. These challenges to British and French rule took place in the context of the new global order that had consolidated in the ashes of war. The United States had emerged as the preeminent capitalist power, its military and economic leadership vastly superseding the older colonial rivals of Europe.6 At the same time, however, the Soviet Union had won great prestige through its resistance to Nazi Germany and was also seeking to extend its global reach. As a result, many of the Arab leftist and anticolonial movements that had emerged in the postwar period looked toward alliances with the Soviet government as a means to carve out space against their colonial masters.
It was in recognition of these dynamics that shortly after World War II, US president Harry Truman declared, in a famous speech to Congress, that the United States would actively intervene around the world in support of its interests and those of the “free world.” Although the Truman Doctrine, as it became known, was framed largely as a response to a growing Soviet influence in Turkey, Greece, and elsewhere, at the root of US foreign policy concerns were the various independence and left-wing movements that had emerged in the wake of Europe’s destruction. Truman’s speech did not directly reference the Middle East, yet its supreme significance was undoubtedly foremost in the minds of the speechwriters—an earlier draft confirmed the importance of the region’s “great natural resources.”7
In light of the potentially enormous ramifications of any realignment of sovereignty in the Middle East—and clearly cognizant of the importance that the region held for its own position atop global hierarchies—the United States took the lead in attempting to recast the nature of political rule during the postcolonial period. The strategy initially pursued by the United States, in close alliance with Britain and France, was to negotiate the handover of power to leaders who were viewed as amenable to continued foreign domination, albeit in the framework of formal independence. Britain had earlier shown some success with this approach, replacing direct rule in Egypt (in 1922) and Iraq (in 1932) with new governments, led by pro-British rulers who allowed a continued presence of foreign troops and largely acquiesced to orders from London. It was with this logic in mind that Lebanon and Syria were constituted as two separate states with the end of French Mandate in 1943, and the Emirate of Transjordan (later called Jordan) was granted independence from the British Mandate in 1946. In 1951, the UN bestowed upon Libya its independence, under the control of the country’s monarch, King Idris.
In most countries, however, this reliance upon pro-Western monarchs and urban elites could not survive long into the 1950s and 1960s. The depth of the problem faced by the Western powers was confirmed in 1951, with the nationalization of the British-owned and -operated Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in Iran. Iran’s recently appointed prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, had been emboldened by mass mobilizations across the country to expel AIOC and place Iran’s oil in state hands.8 The nationalization of AIOC was followed a year later, in 1952, by a dramatic turn of events in Egypt, where the country’s monarch and a principal ally of colonialism in the region, King Farouk, was ousted by a military coup led by the popular officer Gamal Abdel Nasser.9 Nasser’s coming to power forced the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt in 1954 and led to the independence of the Sudan in 1956. Nasser confirmed the West’s worst fears when he turned to the Soviet Union for military support as well as technical and financial assistance for large-scale infrastructure projects such as the Aswan Dam. Egypt’s newfound sovereignty was crowned with the nationalization of the British/French-controlled Suez Canal in 1956—an action celebrated by millions of people across the entire Middle East. As Nasser took these steps, anticolonial struggles were also growing elsewhere in the region, most notably in Algeria, where a guerrilla war for independence was launched against the French occupation in 1954. Although French control did not end in Algeria until 1962, the Algerian revolt was a significant factor in propelling France to grant formal independence to Morocco and Tunisia in 1956.
In response to these challenges, the United States elaborated the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine, proclaimed on January 5, 1957, as part of a “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East.” Decrying the threat of “international communism,” Eisenhower guaranteed US readiness “to employ the armed forces of the United States to assist to defend the territorial integrity and the political independence of any nation in the area.”10 Although Eisenhower’s speech was framed, as Truman’s had been, by the supposed Soviet threat, much of his speech alluded to events in Egypt, particularly the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Eisenhower noted that the canal “enables the nations of Asia and Europe to carry on the commerce that is essential if these countries are to maintain well-rounded and prosperous economies,” and that the Middle East was a “gateway between Eurasia and Africa . . . [with] about two thirds of the presently known oil deposits of the world. . . . The nations of Europe are peculiarly dependent upon this supply, and this dependency relates to transportation as well as to production.”11
Eisenhower’s doctrine was first put to the test in 1957 in Jordan, where a pro-Nasser government, led by Suleiman al-Nabulsi, had come to power and sought to curb the powers of the Western-backed monarch, King Hussein.12 Building upon the anti-British sentiments that were running high following the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nabulsi canceled a treaty between Jordan and Britain and called for closer relations with China, the Soviet Union, and Egypt. In response, Hussein dismissed the Nabulsi government, banned all political parties,