Leon Hadar: Pax Americana is Over

Dr. Leon Hadar is a Washington-based journalist and global affairs analyst.

For several decades, the world’s leading superpower has been trying to help Jews and Arabs reach an agreement over a disputed territory in the Middle East, and to secure its own hegemonic status in that region. But another diplomatic effort to make peace in the Holy Land reached a deadlock, because it was becoming too costly for the superpower to maintain its military presence and diplomatic influence in Egypt, the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia, at a time of growing financial constraints and challenges from new international players.

On Friday afternoon, February 21, 1947, the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Inverchapel, showed up at the State Department and informed Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson that his country could no longer continue providing financial and military support to Greece and Italy. The British “are abdicating from the Middle East,” Secretary of State George Marshall told President Harry Truman.

Indeed, with defense accounting for 40 percent of the British budget in 1947 and the Americans pressing London to repay the huge loans it owned them, Britain adjusted to the new geopolitical realities by ending its prized mandate of Palestine in May 1948, less than a year after giving up the “jewel in the crown” of India.

The transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana in the Middle East was completed during the 1956 Suez Crisis, when the United States threatened to withhold financing that Britain desperately needed unless its forces withdrew from the Suez Canal. And the United States attained what amounted to the dominant position in the Middle East in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the ensuing victory in the first Gulf War, in 1991.

Like Great Britain in 1947, the United States is finding it more and more difficult to maintain its military and diplomatic status in the Middle East...