To understand the Eisenhower doctrine, one has to step back a few years to the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. The Suez was a joint British-French-Egyptian operation in an international zone, a key route for shipping purposes. So when Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal and took over the British and French portions, the two European nations hatched a deal with Israel to fight back. Israel invaded Egypt from the north, while England and France landed paratroopers over the canal. After the situation stabilized, the U.S. forced all sides to withdraw their forces — but Eisenhower worried greatly about the fallout.

On this day, January 30, in 1957, Eisenhower gave his “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East.” He outlined his new foreign policy: that any nation being threatened militarily by another state could receive American economic and military help.

Eisenhower’s main purpose in proclaiming the new policy was to curtail the power of Egypt’s Nasser, and the Soviet Union, who gave him aid, in the Middle East. With French and British influence on the decline after the Suez incident, Eisenhower felt it was up to the U.S. to step in and fill the void.