US support for Israel grew from Soviet successes, not prior preference

Evidence

Meanwhile it is not sufficiently realized that a major change is taking place in American government policy and more profoundly in American national at­ titudes towards the Middle East. During the Cold War, the overriding American interest in the Middle East as elsewhere in the world was to prevent Soviet penetration and domination. American concern about Soviet intentions towards the Middle East began in 1945, when the Soviets, as part of the victorious alliance, presented territorial demands against Turkey and tried to establish a Soviet puppet state in northwestern Iran. The CENTO pact was created to answer this threat; so too the expansion of NATO to Greece and Turkey. The problem became acute in the 1950s with the rapid spread and entrenchment of Soviet power in Egypt and then in some other Arab countries. It is sometimes forgotten nowadays that the closer American strategic relationship with Israel was a con­ sequence, not a cause, of Soviet successes in the Arab world. Before that, Amer­ ican policy towards Israel had been cautious, and American support limited— far less, for example, than that of the Soviet Union in the early years and later of France, whose planes and weaponry made possible the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. The Soviet threat remained a constant preoccupation, and American policy in the region was primarily concerned with meeting it. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1678

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reverses a widely held belief. Worth checking how accepted this revisionist account is among historians — Lewis may be over-stating the causal chain.
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘consequence not cause’ inversion as a template for how strategic rivalries retroactively create regional alliances that then get misread as original commitments.