From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (92 page)

The main reason for the shift can be summed up in one three-letter word: oil. With the loss of Southeast Asian supplies in early 1942, the importance
of Middle Eastern oil increased. World War II made quite clear that oil was the most precious commodity in modern warfare and the essential ingredient of national security and power. The U.S. war machine guzzled voracious quantities—the Fifth Fleet fighting in the Pacific consumed by itself 3.8 billion gallons of fuel in a single year. Government studies warned in alarmist—and, it would turn out, greatly exaggerated—tones that the nation could not meet its essential postwar needs from domestic sources. It must look abroad, and in "all the surveys of the situation," a State Department official recalled, "the pencil came to an awed pause at one point and place—the Middle East."
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The shift can be seen in policies toward individual nations. In Egypt, which had no oil, America's political and military presence remained limited, but its economic influence increased significantly. Minister Alexander Kirk railed against British imperialism and pushed for an Open Door policy.
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United States investors and multinational corporations, working with conservative Egyptian elites and backed by Kirk, formed a sort of "New Deal coalition" that frustrated British neo-colonial schemes by establishing joint ventures for such projects as a huge chemical plant at Aswan on the Nile. The U.S. government helped fund the plan with a 1945 Export-Import Bank loan, marking the beginning of the retreat of British business from Egypt and the entry of U.S. firms such as Ford, Westinghouse, Kodak, and Coca-Cola.
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The United States pursued a much more vigorously independent course in Saudi Arabia. Hull described Saudi oil as "one of the world's greatest prizes." The country's strategic location between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf offered logistical advantages for both the European and Pacific wars.
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In April 1942, the Roosevelt administration opened a legation in Jidda and sent a technical mission to advise the government on irrigation. In February 1943, it made Saudi Arabia eligible for direct lend-lease aid. Two of King Ibn Saud's sons were invited to Washington and entertained lavishly at the White House. The United States extended a sizeable loan to the Arab kingdom and sent a military mission without consulting the British.

The U.S. entry into Saudi Arabia set off a spirited—and for Saudi leaders lucrative—competition with Britain. The desert kingdom at this time had few resources and considerable needs. A man of great physical strength and an astute warrior-statesman, the fiercely independent Ibn Saud had used divide-and-conquer tactics to unite disparate tribes into the foundation of a modern state. He sought to exploit the Anglo-American rivalry to strengthen his nation and enhance his personal power. He submitted duplicate orders. When the two rivals tried to cooperate to curb his gargantuan appetite for military hardware and personal accoutrements, he hinted to each he might turn to the other. "Without arms or resources," he complained to nervous Americans, "Saudi Arabia must not reject the hand that measures its food and drink."
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An aficionado of automobiles, he extorted luxury vehicles from both nations and still whined to Americans about the lack of spare parts and the slow delivery of an automobile promised his son.
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In early 1944, Roosevelt and Churchill sought to calm rising tensions with mutual assurances about each other's stake in Middle Eastern oil. FDR averred that the United States was not casting "sheep's eyes" toward British holdings in Iran; extending the ovine metaphor, the prime minister responded that Britain would not "horn in" on U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia.
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In Saudi Arabia, however, the competition continued and, reflecting the shifting balance of economic power, became increasingly one-sided. In early 1945, Churchill sent Ibn Saud a refurbished Rolls-Royce. FDR trumped him with a spanking new DC-3 aircraft and a crew for one year, the basis for Trans World Airlines' entry into Middle East air routes.
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Saudi Arabia was the only nation for whom lend-lease was continued after the war. The United States solidified its control of Saudi oil and over strong British opposition developed plans to build an air base at Dhahran (completed in 1946) to protect those holdings.
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The wartime experience in Iran best exemplifies the illusions and frustrations of America's initial move into the Middle East. Iran possessed the region's largest known oil reserves, long dominated by the Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company. Threatened by the Nazis in 1941, it was jointly occupied by the British and Russians, who deposed the pro-German shah and installed his son, the twenty-two-year-old Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a retiring and in some ways tragic figure who would be a major player in postwar Middle Eastern history. Sharing British and Soviet concern about the Nazi threat, the United States acquiesced in the occupation. Iran had long survived by playing outside powers against each other. With the British and Russians working together, it turned to the United States as a buffer.

Washington responded sympathetically. United States officials recognized the strategic importance of Iran. Some also saw an opportunity for their nation to live up to its anti-colonial ideals by protecting Iran against the rapacious Europeans. FDR conceded on one occasion that he was "thrilled with the idea of using Iran as an example of what we could do by an unselfish American policy."
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The United States thus charted an independent course, furnishing lend-lease supplies directly rather than through the British and dispatching a number of technical missions to provide the know-how to assist Iran toward independence and modernization. The United States alone, a State Department official observed, could "build up Iran to the point at which it will stand in need of neither British nor Russian assistance to maintain order in its own house."
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This ambitious and ill-conceived experiment in nation-building failed miserably. It operated on the naive assumption that limited advice and assistance from disinterested Americans would enable Iran to develop the stability and prosperity to fend off predators like the Soviet Union and Britain. The U.S. Army did construct a vital supply route from the Persian Gulf to the USSR, but that project brought little immediate benefit to Iran, and the carousing and cultural insensitivity of some of the thirty thousand GIs working on it offended local Muslim sensibilities. A mission directed by Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had won national notoriety as head of the New Jersey State Police during the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's child, achieved a "small miracle" by converting a "once bedraggled" gendarmerie into a respectable rural police force. The other missions were understaffed and poorly prepared. Few of the Americans knew the language or anything about the country. They squabbled among themselves and with the U.S. Army, losing credibility
among their hosts. The most conspicuous failure was a finance mission headed by Arthur Millspaugh, who had enjoyed some success in Iran in a similar capacity in the 1920s. A poor administrator, he spoke no French or Farsi. He correctly pinpointed the problems to be addressed, but his proposed solutions and his imperious methods alienated those Iranians who profited most from the status quo and those nationalists eager for reform.
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"The Iranian himself is the best person to manage his house," nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddeq proclaimed.
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The missions undermined the positive image the United States had brought to Iran in 1941. Iranians made them a scapegoat for the nation's problems. Designed to bolster Iran's independence, they destabilized its politics and aggravated tensions with Britain and the USSR.

The failure of the missions marked the end of the idealistic phase of U.S. policy in Iran. At Tehran in December 1943, Roosevelt persuaded Churchill and Stalin to agree to a declaration pledging support for Iran's independence. Bemoaning Soviet and British imperialism and the chaos that afflicted the American effort in Iran, the voluble Hurley urged a redoubled U.S. intervention headed by a strong-willed individual—no doubt himself. High State Department officials, on the other hand, denounced Hurley's proposal as a "classic case of imperial penetration," an "innocent indulgence in messianic globaloney."
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Roosevelt seemed interested, but his attention quickly shifted to other matters and he rejected Hurley's proposal.

By this time U.S. policy in Iran was undergoing major change. The relentless push for concessions in Iran drove the major oil companies and the U.S. and British governments toward cooperative arrangements to stabilize international production and distribution. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement of 1944 infuriated small U.S. producers and was never approved by Congress, but it eased temporarily the fierce rivalry in Iran. More important, a Soviet move for an oil concession in northern Iran in 1944 increasingly brought two formerly bitter rivals together. Both British and U.S. diplomats viewed Moscow's ploy not as a response to U.S. efforts to gain oil concessions in Iran but as a power play to expand its influence into the Persian Gulf. If not yet working together, Britons and Americans increasingly agreed on the need to check the Soviet threat. No mere puppet, the Iranian government itself resolved the
immediate crisis and protected its future interests by refusing to approve any oil concessions until the war ended.
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By 1943, that other inflammatory ingredient of an already volatile Middle Eastern mix had also come into play. The Zionist quest for a Jewish homeland in Palestine emerged late in the nineteenth century out of desperation—and hope—on the part of Europe's persecuted and dispossessed Jews. The idea gradually gained support among America's large and increasingly influential Jewish community. When World War I set off a bidding war between the Allies and the Central Powers for Jewish support, the Zionist dream first gained international recognition. The British-sponsored Balfour Resolution of 1917, perfunctorily supported by Woodrow Wilson, pledged carefully qualified backing for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. With the rise of a new wave of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, especially in Nazi Germany, immigration to Palestine soared, sparking violent resistance from native Arabs. Fearful on the eve of war of a dangerous conflict in a strategically critical area, Britain in 1939 issued a white paper drastically curtailing Jewish immigration to Palestine and then shutting it down after five years. The white paper solved little. Arabs doubted its assurances; Jews mobilized to fight it.
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The drive for a Jewish homeland became linked in wartime with the unfolding horror of Hitler's Final Solution. As early as the summer of 1942, word began to filter out of Europe of the establishment of death camps and the systematic killing of European Jews. The initial reports did not begin to capture the enormity of the atrocities, but many Americans, insulated from direct contact with the war, questioned them nonetheless. Even when the magnitude of the extermination began to emerge, the administration could do little. FDR publicly condemned the killing of Jews and vowed to conduct war criminal trials to hold the perpetrators accountable. To take the matter out of the hands of an unsympathetic State Department, he created in 1943 a War Refugees Board that enjoyed some success helping Hungarian Jews escape Nazi grasp. But the president refused, with the war still far from won, to challenge Congress by seeking to ease immigration restrictions. And the War Department rejected proposals to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz on grounds that it would accomplish little and divert crucial resources from "essential" military tasks. The pragmatic U.S. response to a great moral catastrophe is somehow unsatisfying. But it is far from clear that any of the courses proposed to deal
with the Holocaust could have been effectively implemented or would have saved significant numbers of lives.
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As the magnitude of Hitler's atrocities began to emerge, Zionists stepped up their agitation for a homeland, and sympathy tinged with some measure of guilt brought growing support. Many Americans also saw large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine as preferable to swelling their already sizeable numbers in the United States. At New York's Biltmore Hotel in May 1942, Palestinian Jewish leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann inspired a gathering of Jewish-Americans to support unlimited immigration into Palestine and the creation of a "Jewish Commonwealth integrated into the structure of the new democratic world."
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The Biltmore group mounted a massive and effective campaign to sway Congress and the American public.

Caught between Arab fears and Jewish demands, the Roosevelt administration handled a volatile issue like a ticking time bomb. The president had made Jewish-Americans an integral part of his New Deal coalition and relied on their electoral support. In the State Department and other federal agencies, on the other hand, there was virulent anti-Semitism. Most important, the question of a Jewish homeland threatened to upset the delicate political balance in a critical region. GIs had already come under fire in Palestine, and military leaders feared that Jewish agitation could spark further conflict in an important rear area. At a time when U.S. attention was focused on the Middle East to meet presumably urgent demands for oil, the Palestine issue threatened to upset the Arabs who controlled it. Ibn Saud prophetically warned Roosevelt in 1943 that if the Jews got their wish, "Palestine would forever remain a hot bed of troubles and disturbances."
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FDR at times fantasized about going to the region after leaving the presidency and promoting economic development projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. He expressed confidence that he could resolve the dispute in face-to-face conversations with Arab leaders. Characteristically, the administration dealt with the most pressing issues with pleas for restraint, platitudes, and vague assurances to
both sides. A master of the latter, FDR, after assuring Ibn Saud in 1943 that he would do nothing without full consultation, concluded the following year—at election time—that Palestine should be for Jews alone.
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During the campaign, while fending off a congressional resolution favoring a Jewish homeland, he promised to help Jewish leaders find ways to establish a state.