The Baghdad Pact, created by Turkey and Iraq in 1955, was an attempt to form a Middle Eastern NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) to combat the looming Soviet threat. The creation and dissemination of the Baghdad Pact during the 1950’s have frequently been understood as an attempt by Great Britain to exercise power by proxy within the Middle East. The Baghdad Pact has generally been studied as either a Western attempt to influence regional politics or as the embodiment of a hegemonic clash between Iraq and Egypt for dominance within the Middle East. Though both of these approaches are valid, they ignore the ramifications of the Baghdad Pact for individual states. This paper will explore the consideration and ultimate rejection of the Baghdad Pact by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Focusing upon the domestic theater, this paper will help illuminate the long-lasting ramifications of the Baghdad Pact deliberations upon dominant political culture within Jordan. Furthermore, the rejection of the Baghdad Pact catalyzed a series of discrete political and foreign policy shifts within Jordan that distinctly altered the character of the state. The Baghdad Pact considerations (December 1955/January 1956) should be understood as the tipping point for the dramatic political events that transpired from 1955 through 1957, not as a discrete isolated event. As a direct result of the Baghdad Pact, Jordan underwent a metamorphosis that drastically altered its reputation within the region: it was no longer a mere British proxy. The popular upheaval that accompanied the Pact forced the Jordanian government to reposition itself within both regional and international politics. Though the Jordanian government later adopted an American subsidy, this subsidy differed from its British predecessor because it did not dictate a course of action nor did it imply a discrete political platform.

I discuss Sudan’s decolonization and its first seven years of independence, 1954-1961. I address how the first cohort of Sudanese officials charged with managing the national economy dealt with the dislocations caused by the retrenchment of Britain’s economic presence in Africa and the Middle East. It might appear sufficient to answer that the Sudanese state, like many other developing nations at the time, responded to dislocation by seeking a greater role for itself in economic affairs. This observation has become commonplace. Consequently, much has been written about the transition of decolonizing nations from open economies to closed economies. There are a bevy of theories offering causal explanations for this historical process. However, little is known about the decision making process of the post-colonial officials who were responsible for constructing these new economies. Reconstructing the logic of officials at different levels of the economic decision-making apparatus, I deal critically with the economic models and the bureaucratic reasoning that determined the approach to regulating and economy pursued by officials within the Sudanese Ministry of Finance and Economics. I situate these ministers and officials’ deliberations about economic policy within the context of the domestic and international political constraints that they faced. I pay close attention to the ways in which British, American and Egyptian competition in the Middle East imposed constraints on policy-makers in Sudan. Domestically, economic policy formation and implementation was constrained by interest groups. I reconstruct not only the economic policies advocated in Khartoum, but the recommendations put forward by international organizations and foreign governments. My research is based on archival and printed material collected in a number of locations: the National Records Office in Khartoum, the Sudan Archive, National Archives, London, the National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group Archive.

On the 50th anniversary of the beginning of John F. Kennedy’s presidency and King Hassan’s enthronement, this paper based on newly available diplomatic sources aims at improving our knowledge of US relations with independent Morocco between 1961 and 1963, and thus at re-evaluating their significance. There have been interesting contributions regarding Kennedy’s policy towards the Arab Middle East (on the question of Nasser, the Saudis and the Yemen War, for example) but much less attention has been paid to Washington policies toward North Africa, particularly Morocco, during this President’s term of office. In order to better understand this 3-year period and its consequences for US-Morocco relations, this paper will analyze the role played by Kennedy’s administration during two important episodes that marked relations between Washington and Rabat at the time. First, it will explain how the acquisition of Soviet MIGs by Morocco (1961-1962) made Washington fear for the future of its military bases and so triggered the beginning of the US military aid program to this North African country. Second, it will show how Algerian-Moroccan tensions over Tindouf (1962) and their eventual border dispute (Sand War, 1963), coupled with Rabat’s poor relations with Madrid due to the Spanish presence in North African territories, represented a challenging dilemma for American policymakers who tried not to jeopardize their relations with two countries that hosted US military facilities in the Western Mediterranean. This paper analyses a combination of regional and global factors in order to shed new light upon an understudied but significant period in contemporary US-Moroccan relations. It is my contention that the 1961-1963 period is relevant to study for having influenced the development and consolidation of a pro-Western foreign policy orientation by the Maghrebi country. It will conclude that despite important disagreements between Rabat and Washington, which severely hindered at times their respective appreciation for each other’s policy interests even causing mutual distrust, these years witnessed the strengthening of a US-Moroccan military and security relationship. This paper is part of a Ph.D. dissertation research already completed and based upon diplomatic documentation, much of it only recently made available, from the American, British, French, and Spanish governments.