ABSTRACT

IN OCTOBER 1957, Macmillan went to Washington to discuss the Syrian crisis and the threat posed by the Soviet ballistic missile programme. Macmillan came away from the conference with a raft of agreements that the apparently shaken Americans had been willing to agree to. These ranged from the sharing of atomic secrets to an agreement to continue joint planning in the Middle East. During the meetings, Selwyn Lloyd pointed out that ‘containment plus’ ‘would be “containment minus” if we could not support the friendly governments of Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq’. The Americans agreed that this potential problem should be urgently studied and ‘appropriate assurances given by the two wherever we could feasibly act’.1 One product of this joint planning was a report entitled ‘Measures to Forestall or Counter an Anti-Western Coup D’état in Jordan or the Lebanon’.2 The Lebanon was of vital importance to the West but most especially to the Americans. President Chamoun and Foreign Minister Charles Malik were the strongest Arab supporters of the Eisenhower Doctrine. If the United States could not prevent Lebanon from falling to Nasser and the radical Arab nationalists, there was little prospect of anywhere else in the region being held.