https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18437/middle-east-american-vision
“If my experiences in the days and weeks devoted to this problem have taught me any one thing, it is that everywhere the need is felt for an American foreign policy — a foreign policy so firmly embedded on principle that it will hold equally for United States troops in China or the atom bomb, or Palestine.” — Bartley Crum.
[Crum’s] account … clearly shows that President Truman, who always… sided with the forces of freedom and progress, was often opposed by his own State Department that practiced a value-free diplomacy in the name of preserving the status quo.
“We can throw our lot in with the forces… who prop up feudalistic regimes in the Arab states in the hope that these will serve as a cordon sanitaire against Soviet; who believe they can successfully continue the same processes of exploitation in the future which have proved successful in the past. Or we can throw our lot in with the progressive forces in the Middle East. We can recognize that there is a slow rising of the peoples, and that we must place ourselves on the side of this inevitable development toward literacy, health, and a decent way of life.” — Bartley Crum.
He was against a status quo that subjected the nations of the region to despotism and poverty. He also realized that Arab despots and their hangers-on used the issue of Palestine as a means of diverting attention from their own misdeeds, wasting Arab energies on xenophobia and religious bigotry. The irony in all this was that Great Britain… sided with the Arab despots, and did all it could to discourage and weaken the very forces of reform and change that Crum saw as the natural allies of Western democracies.
