Quick Take
- Narration: Casey Jones delivers Doran’s revisionist diplomatic history at a measured pace that suits the archival depth of the argument; the tone is appropriately authoritative without tipping into the oratorical.
- Themes: Suez Crisis, US-Israel relationship, Cold War Middle East diplomacy
- Mood: Crisp and revisionist, the pleasure of watching received wisdom get carefully dismantled
- Verdict: A persuasively argued reinterpretation of the 1956 Suez Crisis that challenges the standard account of Eisenhower as an honest broker, grounded in primary sources and told with real narrative momentum for a diplomatic history.
I had been meaning to read something serious about the Suez Crisis for a long time and kept putting it off on the assumption that diplomatic history of the mid-twentieth century would require a large block of uninterrupted reading time and a notepad. This audiobook cured me of that assumption entirely. Michael Doran has written a genuinely propulsive diplomatic narrative, and Casey Jones’s narration sustains the pace across nine hours without the energy flagging.
The argument Doran is making is revisionist in the best sense: he is not simply inverting the standard account but complicating it through close attention to what Eisenhower actually knew, when he knew it, and how his understanding evolved as events unfolded. The conventional version of 1956 casts Eisenhower as an idealist who chose principle over alliance loyalty and forced the British, French, and Israelis to back down from their plan to retake the Suez Canal. Doran’s version is considerably more uncomfortable than that.
Nasser’s Strategic Genius and Eisenhower’s Blind Spot
The book’s central exhibit is Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Doran’s portrait of him is one of the most interesting in the recent diplomatic history literature. Nasser understood the American political psychology of the 1950s with unusual precision: he knew that invoking American opposition to European colonialism would be a reliable lever for driving a wedge between Washington and London, regardless of what Egypt was actually doing with Soviet arms or what it was doing to neighboring Arab states that had been cultivating American goodwill.
Doran traces this manipulation with documentary specificity, showing how Nasser repeatedly calibrated his public statements and diplomatic moves to maximize the pressure on Eisenhower’s most politically vulnerable points. The arms deal with the Soviet Union, the destabilization of Jordan and Lebanon, the cultivation of anti-Western sentiment in the Arab world: all of these, in Doran’s account, were steps in a strategy that Eisenhower persistently misread as something more benign. Casey Jones handles the passage through extensive diplomatic cable summaries and policy meeting reconstructions without losing the thread, and Doran has written the book with enough attention to narrative structure that even the denser archival passages have a directional pull.
Churchill, Eden, and the British Miscalculation
The British side of the story is handled with fairness if not sympathy. Doran acknowledges that Eden and Churchill were genuinely alarmed by the Soviet penetration of the Middle East that Nasser’s arms deal represented, and that their assessment of the threat was not entirely wrong. Their error was strategic: they assumed that Eisenhower, facing a Soviet-aligned Nasser, would ultimately side with the European powers against the canal seizure, and they planned accordingly. The betrayal they experienced when Eisenhower intervened against them was therefore compounded by the shock of miscalculation.
The joint British-French-Israeli planning that produced the Tripartite Aggression is reconstructed from multiple perspectives, and Doran is particularly good on the Israeli calculation, which was the most cold-eyed of the three. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were under no illusions about British reliability or French staying power; they were pursuing specific, limited objectives in Sinai and treating the alliance of convenience as what it was.
The Conclusion Eisenhower Finally Reached
The book’s payoff is Doran’s account of Eisenhower’s gradual, reluctant recognition that his initial approach had been wrong. The realization did not come quickly or cleanly; it accumulated over several years as Nasser’s actual behavior in the Arab world made the original assessment increasingly difficult to sustain. By the time Eisenhower promulgated the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, the strategic logic had shifted considerably from what it had been in 1956, and Doran traces that shift with the same archival care he brings to the earlier period.
Reviewer Uri Pilichowski, reading from a strongly pro-Israel perspective, found in this book confirmation of his view that Eisenhower was the worst president for the US-Israel relationship. That reading is available in the text but is not quite what Doran is arguing. Doran’s conclusion is more nuanced: that Eisenhower made a specific, consequential error, recognized it, and adjusted, and that the adjustment produced the alliance structure that has persisted in broadly recognizable form ever since. The book is a diagnosis of a mistake, not a condemnation of a man.
There is a strand of the book that deserves particular attention: Doran’s treatment of the moment when Eisenhower, confronting the evidence of Nasser’s actual orientation, had to decide what to do next. The Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 is usually taught as a largely separate development from Suez, a new framework for resisting Soviet influence in the Middle East. Doran reads it as a direct consequence of the Suez realization, a pivot from one strategic anchor to another, and from that reading flows his broader argument about how the US-Israel relationship took its current shape. That causal chain is the book’s most original contribution, and it holds up to scrutiny in ways that simpler revisionist arguments often do not.
Who Should Pick Up This Nine-Hour Argument
This is well suited for listeners interested in Cold War diplomatic history, the origins of the US-Israel strategic relationship, or Eisenhower’s foreign policy more broadly; readers who enjoyed Evan Thomas or Robert Kagan on American foreign policy and want something more focused; and anyone who finds that diplomatic history works better in audio when narrated with real momentum. Consider skipping if you want significant coverage of the Arab or British domestic debates rather than the American strategic perspective, or if you are looking for social or cultural history rather than high-level diplomatic reconstruction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Doran argue that Eisenhower was wrong to oppose the Tripartite invasion of Suez in 1956?
Doran’s argument is more specific than a blanket verdict on the intervention. He argues that Eisenhower’s opposition was based on a flawed reading of Nasser’s actual strategic alignment and intentions, and that the costs of that misreading became apparent over the following years. He does not argue that supporting the invasion would have been straightforwardly correct, only that the decision was made on premises that the evidence did not support.
How does the book handle the Israeli role in the Tripartite Alliance, particularly Ben-Gurion’s decision-making?
Doran treats Israeli decision-making as the most strategically clear-eyed of the three parties. Ben-Gurion and Dayan had limited specific objectives in Sinai and fewer illusions about the durability of the alliance. The book gives this perspective real weight and does not subordinate it to the British or American narrative.
Is this a heavily academic book or is it accessible to general readers interested in the period?
It is written for general readers rather than specialists. Doran came to this material as a policy analyst and writer rather than as a traditional academic historian, and the prose reflects that. The archival depth is there for those who want to follow up on the citations, but the argument moves at a pace that does not require background in the scholarly literature.
Does the book address how the Suez Crisis shaped subsequent US policy in the region beyond the immediate Eisenhower years?
The final chapters make the case that Eisenhower’s pivot toward Israel following his reassessment of Nasser’s strategy laid foundational groundwork for the special relationship that developed more fully under subsequent administrations. Doran’s argument is about causation and legacy rather than just event reconstruction, and the connection to later policy is part of what he is trying to establish.
