ABSTRACT
Not until 1979 did the United States confront directly the full scope of the three strategic dilemmas of Persian Gulf security. Through the first three postwar decades, the tension between strategy and capability did not emerge because the United States perceived as very unlikely a direct Soviet move into Southwest Asia and because the British, until the 1970s, maintained a military presence in the Gulf. The tensions between globalism and regionalism and between unilateralism and collectivism, however, became readily apparent during the 1950s. America’s overriding concern with Moscow’s intentions in the Middle East and its tendency to interpret developments within an East-West rather than a regional context took root in the late 1940s and intensified through the late 1950s. The key policy initiatives during this period—the Truman Doctrine and the Eisenhower Doctrine—were both responses to perceived shifts in the nature of the Soviet threat to the region. Eisenhower’s reaction to the rise of Nasserism, the Iraqi revolution, and the political turmoil in Lebanon in 1958 revealed a preoccupation with stopping the spread of communism, not with understanding or responding to Arab nationalism.
