Here’s something fascinating about history.
Sometimes presidents make decisions to solve a problem happening right in front of them—and those decisions end up shaping the world for the next sixty years.
That’s basically what happened with John F. Kennedy and the Middle East.
It’s the early 1960s.
Kennedy comes into office at the absolute height of the Cold War. America and the Soviet Union are staring each other down, nuclear weapons are everywhere, and virtually every international crisis is viewed through one question:
Which side are you on?
And right in the middle of all this is Egypt and its enormously influential president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Nasser is pushing Arab nationalism.
He doesn’t want the Arab world controlled by America.
He doesn’t want it controlled by the Soviet Union.
And he certainly doesn’t want it controlled by the old European colonial powers.
He wants the Arab world to chart its own course.
Kennedy sees an opportunity.
Instead of automatically treating Nasser as an enemy, Kennedy tries to build a relationship with him.
Why?
Because if Nasser stays relatively neutral, America potentially prevents the Soviet Union from gaining greater influence throughout the Arab world.
Sounds reasonable.
Except there’s a problem.
Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarchy looks at Nasser and sees something completely different.
They don’t just see another Arab leader.
They see revolutionary nationalism spreading across the region, potentially threatening monarchies—including their own.
Then Yemen explodes.
In 1962, a revolution overthrows the Yemeni monarchy.
Egypt sends tens of thousands of troops to support the new republican government.
Saudi Arabia supports the royalists.
And suddenly Kennedy is standing between two governments he wants relationships with that are effectively supporting opposite sides of a war.
Welcome to the Middle East.
And while all of that is happening, there’s another piece on the chessboard:
Israel.
Kennedy is also strengthening America’s security relationship with Israel.
His administration approves the sale of Hawk surface-to-air missiles to Israel—the first major American weapons system sold to the country.
And now look at what Kennedy is trying to do simultaneously.
Keep Egypt from moving toward Moscow.
Protect Saudi Arabia from instability.
Strengthen Israel’s security.
Prevent a regional war.
Contain Soviet influence.
And, minor detail, avoid World War III.
That’s not foreign policy.
That’s geopolitical Whac-A-Mole.
But here’s where this story becomes really interesting.
Kennedy’s immediate problem was the Cold War.
But some of the relationships strengthened during that period lasted far longer than the Cold War itself.
The Soviet Union disappeared in 1991.
Nasser died in 1970.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
The Yemen civil war of that era eventually ended.
But look at the relationships that remained.
The United States and Saudi Arabia became deeply intertwined strategically.
And the American-Israeli security relationship expanded dramatically under subsequent presidents.
So decisions made partly because Washington was worried about Soviet influence in the Middle East helped create relationships that became permanent features of American foreign policy.
And there’s something even more interesting about Saudi Arabia.
Some American officials during that era wondered whether a traditional monarchy like Saudi Arabia could even survive the revolutionary forces sweeping across the Arab world.
Well…
Nasser is gone.
The Soviet Union is gone.
The Cold War is gone.
And the House of Saud is still there.
That’s history’s sense of humor.
But I think there’s a much bigger lesson here.
Governments constantly tell us that a policy is necessary because of the crisis happening today.
And sometimes they’re right.
But almost nobody can predict what that policy becomes tomorrow.
An alliance created to contain communism becomes an economic partnership.
A weapons sale becomes the beginning of a much larger defense relationship.
A temporary strategic arrangement becomes an institution.
And eventually people forget why it started in the first place.
That’s why understanding history matters.
Because when we look at the world today, we tend to assume that the relationships we see were inevitable.
They weren’t.
People made choices.
Presidents made choices.
Governments made choices.
Sometimes those choices worked.
Sometimes they failed.
And sometimes they produced consequences nobody sitting in the room could possibly have imagined.
Kennedy was trying to navigate Nasser, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Yemen and the Soviet Union in 1962 and 1963.
He wasn’t designing American foreign policy for the twenty-first century.
He was trying to get through Tuesday.
And yet some of those decisions helped establish relationships that would influence American policy for generations.
That’s the incredible thing about history.
The people making it rarely know they’re making history.
They’re dealing with the crisis sitting on their desk.
And sixty years later, the rest of us are still living with what they decided to do about it.
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