The Open Question

“I pinched myself to see if I was still awake. There was world politics moving on without anyone noticing.” Thus Sir John Glubb, head of the Arab Legion until 1956, who further comments, “No one seems to realize that rather than having lost, the Russians have now made the Arabs dependent on them .. . It was a smart move on their part to egg on the Arabs, realizing that their immediate defeat would leave them at Moscow’s mercy.” It is doubtful whether it was planned quite that way by the Kremlin. There is reason to believe that by the, true or false, Russian intelligence passed on to Cairo concerning Israel’s plans for a massive attack on Syria, Moscow intended only to compel Nasser to such a close alliance with Syria’s Communist-leaning regime that Egypt too would come under Russian control; and that Nasser felt he must risk war with Israel to preserve his independence as the leader and protector of the Arabs against the pressures and counterpressures of America and Russia. In any case, the men who now direct Soviet foreign policy are clearly following Lenin’s famous precept for meeting with reverses: “One step backward, two steps forward.” Like a jujitsu champion utilizing his opponent’s strength to throw him off balance, the Kremlin is now using Israel’s victory—generally acclaimed in America as ours also—to extend Russian power and influence in the Middle East. What are a billion or so of lost armaments in Sinai as compared to the opportunity to expel Western influence from the Arab world, and establish Russia as the protecting power over the strategic area which contains the oil resources vital to Europe? Russia is now in process of acquiring the Mediterranean naval and air bases for lack of which she could not, had she wished, have come to the rescue of the Arab states after Israel’s super-Pearl Harbor attack. Podgorny’s price for replenishing Egypt’s military arsenal was supposedly a Russian naval base in Alexandria. America’s Wheelus Air Force Base may become available to Russia if the weak regime of King Idris succumbs to the pressures of the Nasserites whose Union of Workers has thus far prevented the flow of Libyan oil to Britain and Germany. The root cause of Washington’s blunders or miscalculations today as yesterday would seem to be the never-extinguished hope that Roosevelt’s “Grand Design” can yet be realized. According to the London Sunday Times report on Glassboro, the most important long-term policy suggestion was “President Johnson’s appeal to Premier Kosygin for something close to a superpower condominium of the world.” Thus more than twenty years after Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, the Kremlin continues to advance its aims by practical diplomacy while we fail to exert our power and influence in the world’s trouble spots, hoping instead for an agreement with Moscow to order the world together. The Hosannahs sung in America to Israel’s successful blitzkrieg, are all grist to the Soviet propaganda mill by giving substance to the Communist thesis current in the Arab world that Israel is ‘an outpost of Western imperialism.”

Max Geltman in his article, ‘The Enemy is the Same” (NR, July 11), wrote that whether or not James Burnham is right in saying that America gave ‘the strategic cover without which the Israeli forces could not have moved,” we would have been right “to protect theirs and the free world’s vital interests.” America’s interests are in fact no more identical with Israel’s than Israel’s with those of the majority of Jews who prefer assimilation in the West to the Zionist “blood and soil” concept, and therefore refuse to emigrate to the “armed ghetto” which Israel must continue to be, unless and until it comes to terms with its Arab neighbors by acknowledging the wrong done to them and making reparation. In 1956, after the joint IsraeliAnglo-French attack on Egypt, President Eisenhower put American principles and interests, which are perhaps synonymous, ahead of votes and nevertheless won the election. Will President Johnson, preoccupied in Vietnam, in retrieving the errors of Truman and Marshall which lost China to the West, realize in time that the Middle East will also succumb to the Communists unless he now reverses course and gives the Arabs some hope of justice at the hands of the West?

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Freda Utley

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“I pinched myself to see if I was still awake. There was world politics moving on without anyone noticing.” Thus Sir John Glubb, head of the Arab Legion until 1956, who further comments, “No one seems to realize that rather than having lost, the Russians have now made the Arabs dependent on them .. . It was a smart move on their part to egg on the Arabs, realizing that their immediate defeat would leave them at Moscow’s mercy.” It is doubtful whether it was planned quite that way by the Kremlin. There is reason to believe that by the, true or false, Russian intelligence passed on to Cairo concerning Israel’s plans for a massive attack on Syria, Moscow intended only to compel Nasser to such a close alliance with Syria’s Communist-leaning regime that Egypt too would come under Russian control; and that Nasser felt he must risk war with Israel to preserve his independence as the leader and protector of the Arabs against the pressures and counterpressures of America and Russia. In any case, the men who now direct Soviet foreign policy are clearly following Lenin’s famous precept for meeting with reverses: “One step backward, two steps forward.” Like a jujitsu champion utilizing his opponent’s strength to throw him off balance, the Kremlin is now using Israel’s victory—generally acclaimed in America as ours also—to extend Russian power and influence in the Middle East. What are a billion or so of lost armaments in Sinai as compared to the opportunity to expel Western influence from the Arab world, and establish Russia as the protecting power over the strategic area which contains the oil resources vital to Europe? Russia is now in process of acquiring the Mediterranean naval and air bases for lack of which she could not, had she wished, have come to the rescue of the Arab states after Israel’s super-Pearl Harbor attack. Podgorny’s price for replenishing Egypt’s military arsenal was supposedly a Russian naval base in Alexandria. America’s Wheelus Air Force Base may become available to Russia if the weak regime of King Idris succumbs to the pressures of the Nasserites whose Union of Workers has thus far prevented the flow of Libyan oil to Britain and Germany. The root cause of Washington’s blunders or miscalculations today as yesterday would seem to be the never-extinguished hope that Roosevelt’s “Grand Design” can yet be realized. According to the London Sunday Times report on Glassboro, the most important long-term policy suggestion was “President Johnson’s appeal to Premier Kosygin for something close to a superpower condominium of the world.” Thus more than twenty years after Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, the Kremlin continues to advance its aims by practical diplomacy while we fail to exert our power and influence in the world’s trouble spots, hoping instead for an agreement with Moscow to order the world together. The Hosannahs sung in America to Israel’s successful blitzkrieg, are all grist to the Soviet propaganda mill by giving substance to the Communist thesis current in the Arab world that Israel is ‘an outpost of Western imperialism.”

Max Geltman in his article, ‘The Enemy is the Same” (NR, July 11), wrote that whether or not James Burnham is right in saying that America gave ‘the strategic cover without which the Israeli forces could not have moved,” we would have been right “to protect theirs and the free world’s vital interests.” America’s interests are in fact no more identical with Israel’s than Israel’s with those of the majority of Jews who prefer assimilation in the West to the Zionist “blood and soil” concept, and therefore refuse to emigrate to the “armed ghetto” which Israel must continue to be, unless and until it comes to terms with its Arab neighbors by acknowledging the wrong done to them and making reparation. In 1956, after the joint IsraeliAnglo-French attack on Egypt, President Eisenhower put American principles and interests, which are perhaps synonymous, ahead of votes and nevertheless won the election. Will President Johnson, preoccupied in Vietnam, in retrieving the errors of Truman and Marshall which lost China to the West, realize in time that the Middle East will also succumb to the Communists unless he now reverses course and gives the Arabs some hope of justice at the hands of the West?