Michael S. Doran’s Ike’s Gamble Reviewed by the New York Times

This book is subversively revisionist history with sharp relevance to the present. Listen to whether this tale is familiar.

A new administration comes to power, convinced that its predecessor has made a hash of Middle East policy. The new team’s big idea: a bold diplomatic overture to the region’s leading Muslim state. True, that leading Muslim state has a bad habit of sponsoring terrorism and threatening important allies. But the new team believes that much of this bad behavior is a response to provocations by the West and by Israel. Anyway, like it or not, the troublesome Muslim state represents the future, its local enemies outdated legacies of the past. By squeezing Israel and other allies for concessions, the United States could prove its own good faith — and get on the right side of history.

This strategic perception gripped its believers so strongly that such terms as “worldview” fail to do it justice. Its proponents “regarded it not as an intellectual construct but as a description of reality itself.”

Barack Obama and the ayatollahs’ Iran? Yes. But before that, Dwight Eisenhower and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. The gamble of “Ike’s Gamble,” by Michael Doran, is the determined wooing of Nasser by the Eisenhower administration over its first four years in office. Why that gamble failed is the urgently timely question answered by this deeply researched, tightly argued and accessibly concise book.

Hoping to stabilize the region, Doran argues, Eisenhower instead convulsed it. Seeking to assuage radicals, his administration instead empowered them.