The Powell Speech in Perspective

In January 1953, President Eisenhower entered the White House determined to downgrade the Arab-Israeli conflict to the more urgent need of consolidating a broad-based regional security alliance to effectively contain Soviet penetration in the Middle East. Three years later his personal envoy, Robert Anderson, was involved in a desperate mediating effort between Cairo and Jerusalem, seeking to defuse tensions on the Egyptian-Israeli front. Similarly, in January 1981, President Reagan started his tenure as President convinced that the overriding need for American diplomacy was to forge a “strategic consensus” of anti-Soviet forces in the Gulf area, rather than tackle the Palestinian predicament head-on. Twenty months later, in the middle of the Lebanon War, the President found himself completely absorbed in the dynamics of crisis-management in the Palestinian sphere, ultimately resulting in the September 1982 Reagan Plan.