What The Realists Wrought

During these very days fifty years ago, history was being betrayed by the cool realists in Washington. But the history was being made in the streets of Budapest and on the sands near Suez.

Let me begin with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Of the Warsaw Pact countries, Hungary may not have been the most brutalized. But it had a resilient population of pious Catholics, some socialists and a smattering of liberals. A goodly number of these Catholics had been sympathizers of the fascist regime of Admiral Horthy, which was independent of Nazi Germany until late in the war. But it certainly had its own anti-Semitic policies, though short of genocide. In any case, once the Germans invaded the country the final solution of the Jewish question would be applied in Hungary, as well. (See the masterful and massive tomes of The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary Randolph L. Braham) Then there was the case of the patriot Cardinal Mindszenty, destined to be a hero of the revolution, a bitterly ironic hero of a revolution against tyranny. At best, he had looked away from the deportations to Auschwitz; at worst, well, horrors.

Still, for all the anomalies, it was a true revolution from below and it was a revolution against an ugly and cruel tyranny. This was the communism of Comrade Stalin, except in the Finno-Ugric language, the only such language in central Europe. How much had American exhortation provoked the uprising? Probably not much. But there had been a certain cynicism behind the Eisenhower-John Foster Dulles policy of "roll-back," the Republican alternative to "containment." For while Hungarian young people were desperately pitting their bodies against Soviet tanks the official and unofficial radio networks of the "free world" were exhorting them to fight on. Except that the "free world" was doing zilch to help them. (See a wonderful new book by Charles Gati, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt about, in part, this non-policy policy.) In any case, roll-back had never been a policy. It was a bludgeon with which to beat the Democrats.

It's a cliché. But the Hungarian Revolution was drowned in the blood of patriots. Patriots who actually had a vision of what a free society might be like. On the other hand, Washington was not about to confront the Soviet Union over little Hungary. It would reap whatever propaganda credits it could from the horrors. But it would not risk anything to restrain Moscow. Gati refers to an article in TNR by Richard Lowenthal, "Hungary: Were We Helpless?" (November. 26, 1956). No, Lowenthal wrote, we weren't. We could have withdrawn from western Europe in exchange for the loosening of Soviet control over eastern Europe. This was for all kinds of reasons a silly proposal, not least because the Soviets had constructed a state within a state, made up of true believer fanatics who would never give up the dream of communism. Until, that is, it collapsed all around them. The great fear of Lowenthal and of Washington was the Russian bomb. But, as we saw only six years later in Cuba, the Soviets would not cross the brink at all.

So the Dulles cool realists left Hungary under Soviet control. They risked nothing to change the course of history to what it might have been. And it would take almost a quarter century for the Soviet empire to collapse of its own weight.

Those same American realists were playing cool politics over Suez. Dulles did not exactly sympathize with the anti-colonial revolution. But somehow he believed that he could wean Egypt and its mercurial dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, away from their entanglements with Soviet designs and Soviet policy. Cairo had unilaterally nationalized the Suez Canal Company, and France and the United Kingdom wanted it back. Also, as it happened, Egypt had been supporting a vicious ongoing war against Israel. Not so much because it thought that it might defeat Israel. But because Nasser aspired to be the leader of the Arab world. His doctrine was pan-Arabism, one of the sequential illusions that mesmerized the Arabs after the establishment of Israel. Israel could do nothing to reduce the Arab fantasy. But it wanted to stop the war across its frontier with Egypt. The three countries made an alliance, and Israel, with very meaningful tactical support of Britain and France, invaded the Sinai. And captured it. Nasser sunk all of the ships in the Canal, paralyzing shipping in that part of the world.

So what did Dulles do? He teamed up with the Soviets--who were under enormous pressure in Hungary and throughout Europe--to force the three allies back. Dulles assumed that would win him the fealty of Nasser. Instead, Nasser gave his fealty to Moscow, and solidified the loyalty of the "non-aligned" to the communist bloc. Nasser went on to launch the Six-Days War in 1967, bringing a humiliating defeat to the Arab world. After that, he waged another war against Yemen, in which Egyptian forces utilized gas weapons. This alliance of Washington and Cairo was a contraption of the State Department realists.

And the other consequences? France has never forgiven us for betraying them to such a tyrant. We are still suffering from the resentment of the Quai d'Orsay. The United Kingdom was traumatized by the betrayal; and when rebellion against American leadership crops up among the Tories, much of it can still be traced to Dulles's folly fifty years ago. Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1957 with a guarantee of safe passage through the waterways of the region and also an assurance of peace from a sizeable United Nations presence between it and Egyptian territory. This lasted until 1967 war, when Nasser snapped his fingers and U Thant, the U.N. secretary-general, jumped to his feet. He immediately ordered the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force from Gaza and Egypt, and all that was expected from the tri-partite retreat ten and eleven years earlier came to naught.

President Eisenhower finally realized that the betrayal by the United States of its three allies was a colossal blunder, a punitive act of the State Department realists who completely misunderstood what an American-enforced retreat by the United Kingdom, France, and Israel would release in the area. It fissured the western alliance and encouraged Arab messianism and Arab mischief. See the essay by one of the most learned and literate scholars of the Middle East, Elie Kedourie, "Suez Revisited," in his collection of studies, Islam in the Modern World, published in 1980 by New Republic Books.