A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979 by Galen Jackson

Abstract

The vast majority of Americans alive today who have no first-hand memories of the years 1965 to 1980 may nonetheless have some awareness of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam, the opening to China in 1971–1972, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the related Arab oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages by the virulently anti-American leaders of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Those with a bit more interest in international affairs might also be aware of the easing of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in the détente of the early 1970s, a policy that was nearly discredited by the end of the decade. This latter puzzle is the topic of Galen Jackson's deeply researched book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979.For scholars of this period, the challenge is not the lack of availability of original source material. In fact, a goldmine of formerly classified documents have been released, particularly from U.S. archives, including the tape-recorded conversations of President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Taping may have ended with Nixon's departure, but by now most of the records from the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC), and even many from key intelligence agencies, have been released, and scores of the participants in policymaking have written memoirs, published their diaries, and given extensive interviews. The sources are rich not only from U.S. archives but also, increasingly, from Israel and the former Soviet Union, along with a few accounts from seemingly reliable Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, and other Arab sources. In short, researchers have been nearly overwhelmed with the immense abundance of sources.The challenge for scholars has been to master this huge amount of material while finding a distinctive angle to develop. Jackson has done this well in a relatively short but thoroughly footnoted book, the major thesis of which is that the policy of détente espoused by Nixon in the early 1970s fell victim to a stubborn U.S. Cold War mindset, particularly but not exclusively represented by Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's disinclination to work with the Soviet Union for an overall Arab-Israeli peace was aggravated by well-known features of the U.S. political system, such as the electoral cycle, the influence of pressure groups, and the role of Congress. In Jackson's view, the result was the Carter administration's abandonment of its initial search for a comprehensive peace and its shift to brokering an Egyptian-Israeli agreement as the more realistic, but less consequential, alternative. Jackson claims that the U.S. government's desire to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East, or at least to weaken Moscow's influence there, was more important than Soviet rigidity and unwillingness to cooperate with the United States in dooming the chances for a comprehensive Middle East peace in the 1970s. The result has been a series of wars and crises, in Lebanon, between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as in Iraq and elsewhere. The implication, although not fully developed as a conclusion, is that much of this might have been avoided if a cooperative approach with the Soviet Union toward Arab-Israeli peacemaking had been sustained through the 1970s.In both my academic and my policy-advising roles—I served on the NSC staff working on the Middle East from 1972 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1979—I have also argued that the United States should have tried harder to broaden the so-called peace process beyond the Israeli-Egyptian front. Jackson is certainly correct when he calls attention to the importance of the Cold War lens through which Middle East developments were often seen, as well as the impact of domestic politics. But several other points also deserve to be included in a comprehensive study of this period.Jackson correctly starts his account with the June 1967 war. It was indeed an unanticipated yet pivotal development, and it caused many U.S. policymakers to conclude that Israel's overwhelming military victory ensured a degree of stability during which the Arab parties to the conflict would conclude that they would have to negotiate with Israel, perhaps through U.S. diplomatic channels, to recover their lost territories. United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, passed with U.S. and Soviet support in November 1967, set out the envisaged “land for peace” exchange.Nixon's predecessor, Johnson, was much less interested in foreign policy than Nixon was, and he was not so much affected by a Cold War mindset in his approach to the Middle East. Instead, Johnson was trying to grapple with the escalating war in Vietnam, which was absorbing much of his time and draining U.S. resources. He was too preoccupied to deal with another crisis in the Middle East. On the third day of the Six-Day war, when Israel was well on its way to victory and most of Johnson's advisers were both relieved and delighted, Johnson said at a meeting of the NSC that “he was not sure we were out of our troubles.” He could not visualize the USSR saying it had miscalculated, and then walking away. Our objective should be to “develop as few heroes and as few heels as we can.” It is important for everybody to know we are not for aggression. We are sorry this has taken place. We are in as good a position as we could be given the complexities of the situation. We thought we had a commitment from those governments, but it went up in smoke very quickly. The President said that by the time we get through with all the festering problems we are going to wish the war had not happened. [“Memorandum for the Record,” 7 June 1967, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1967, Vol. XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, pp. 347–348, emphasis added.]Compared to Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger seemed more clearly wedded to a Cold-War view of the world. But it is worth noting that Nixon, as a private citizen in June 1967, had sent a telegram to Johnson urging him not to tilt too far in Israel's direction for fear of alienating the Arab world. Once Nixon became president in 1969, he emphasized that U.S. policy toward the Middle East would be run from the State Department, much to Kissinger's annoyance. During the diplomacy in 1969–1970 led by Secretary of State William Rogers, U.S. officials sought to work out a common U.S.-Soviet approach to peacemaking and produced the so-called Rogers Plan, which was initially meant to be a joint U.S.-Soviet proposal until Moscow backed away when the Egyptians refused to accept it.Kissinger's role in policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict grew after the Jordan crisis of 1970. As he gained ever greater influence, he made clear that he did not favor any diplomatic initiative toward Egypt until President Anwar al-Sadat reduced the significant Soviet military presence in Egypt. When Sadat finally did precisely that in mid-1972, Kissinger was puzzled. Was this a sign of Sadat's desperation? Why had he not asked in advance for a quid pro quo from the United States? Sadat did offer to open a backchannel to Kissinger and Nixon, excluding the State Department, which Kissinger used first to play for time because 1972 was an election year and Nixon was involved in complex diplomacy concerning Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, all aimed at helping his reelection campaign.My reading of Kissinger in this period is that he did not perceive any urgency in starting Arab-Israeli diplomacy. He assumed that the Arabs had no military option; that the oil weapon was a bluff; and that Israel, if war broke out, would win as decisively as it had in 1967. In all of this he was wrong. Interestingly, Nixon was much more alarmed about a resumption of hostilities in the Middle East and was much more attracted to the idea of cooperating with Moscow to bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end.Once war broke out on 6 October 1973, Kissinger was not only national security adviser but also secretary of state (the only person who has ever served in the two positions simultaneously). The crisis was thus his to manage. Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal, which got even worse during the three weeks of the war. Kissinger, to his credit, did immediately open channels of communication to Moscow, Cairo, and, of course, Israel. He assumed that the Israelis would quickly gain the upper hand, which turned out to be true on the Syrian front but not in Sinai. Initially, both superpowers went to some lengths to show restraint. Just as the Soviet Union began to send military supplies by air to Egypt and Syria, Kissinger tried to work out a formula for a ceasefire in place, which would have left Israeli forces somewhat beyond the prewar lines on the Syrian front but well back from the Suez Canal on the Egyptian front. In a still under-analyzed initiative, Kissinger tried to persuade Soviet leaders to convince Sadat to accept a ceasefire in place, promising that he would seek to get the Israelis to agree. How he managed to persuade the Israelis to go along, is still not clear. The problem was that the Soviet Union could not deliver Sadat, who apparently wanted the war to drag on and was awaiting the Saudi announcement of the oil embargo.By 13 October, after the failure of the ceasefire initiative became clear, Kissinger's strategy shifted. A large-scale airlift of arms to Israel began, and within days the Israelis began a rapid advance on the Egyptian front. Kissinger deflected calls from the Soviet Union for him to resume talks on how to end the war. Meanwhile, Nixon's domestic position was crumbling because of Watergate, and Kissinger seemed to be genuinely worried that the president's political woes would signal U.S. weakness, with possibly dire consequences. This was the mindset that accounts for his slow-walking the diplomacy with Moscow, his hint to the Israelis that they could violate the eventual ceasefire agreement of 22 October without serious repercussions from Washington, and his “deliberate overreaction” of declaring a DEFCON-3 military alert when Soviet leaders clumsily made a veiled threat to intervene militarily if the Israelis pushed further with their offensive against the Egyptian Third Army. Jackson is certainly correct that an element of the Cold War mindset is on display here, but there was more than that as well. He is also correct that the beginning of the U.S. public's turning away from the idea of détente with the Soviet Union was in no small measure attributable to the so-called “nuclear alert.”During Jimmy Carter's presidency, the challenges were different. Carter and his key foreign-policy advisers—namely, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski—initially favored a so-called comprehensive approach to dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carter even referred to the possibility of a “Palestinian homeland” within the first few months of his presidency. Although Brzezinski shared with Kissinger a strong aversion to close cooperation with the Soviet Union, this was not so much the case with Carter and Vance. But one of the achievements of Kissinger's diplomacy was that the United States had quite good direct channels to all the major Arab players except for the Palestinians. Although U.S. officials did consult with their Soviet counterparts, most of the diplomacy was being conducted directly with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom had met directly with Carter by mid-1977.Carter's plan for a joint U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored multilateral Arab-Israeli negotiation at Geneva by the end of 1977 was thrown off track primarily by the unexpected election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel in the middle of the year. U.S. officials needed a bit of time to sort out which parts of Begin's hardline rhetoric deserved to be taken most seriously, but by the fall it was becoming clear that the original plan for convening a peace conference in Geneva was in serious trouble. The critical reaction in U.S. public opinion to the U.S.-Soviet statement of 1 October 1977 calling for a reconvening of the Geneva conference was a blow to Carter. Sadat's subsequent surprise offer to go to Jerusalem reshuffled the deck, opening the possibility of a fast track to an Egyptian-Israeli agreement that might serve as a model for later negotiations on other fronts. By early 1978, Carter had concluded that he needed to go forward quickly with the Egyptian-Israeli talks, and he had also determined that Sadat did not need much on the Palestinian front as political cover for what was likely to be perceived as a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace.We will never know what Carter might have done on Arab-Israeli issues if he had won a second term or if the Iranian revolution had not occurred. But it was not a Cold War mindset that led him away from seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace. Instead, this shift was spurred by the intricacies of Middle East politics and Begin's adamancy that he would not deal with the “Arabs of Eretz Israel” and would never abandon any part of Judea and Samaria, as he always called the West Bank. Domestic politics also inevitably played a role.Jackson is correct that the failure of U.S. diplomacy in the 1970s to move toward a comprehensive Middle East peace in cooperation with the Soviet Union was a serious blow for the policy of détente. The Reagan administration was filled with people, including some Democrats, who had rallied to Reagan as the best hope for leading the campaign against the “evil empire.” Many former Democrats, some deeply angry about the tough-minded way Carter had treated Israel, flocked to the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger. Amazingly, Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush, and especially Bush's able Secretary of State James Baker, managed to keep the possibility of U.S.-Soviet cooperation alive during and after the Iraq crisis of 1990–1991, culminating with the Madrid Conference in the fall of 1991. That last effort at a comprehensive Middle East peace was very close to what Carter had envisaged in 1977, and, if Bush had been reelected, he and his new secretary of state might have made serious headway on both the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts, especially when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in power. But it was left to Bill Clinton to pursue the elusive peace process, and by the end of his two terms the prospects for a comprehensive Middle East peace had essentially disappeared, as had the Cold War and the mentality it had spawned. The “peace process” remained in a comatose state during the period of U.S. global preponderance in the 1990s. If the current era is evolving into a new Cold War, perhaps with both Russia and China, Jackson has already warned us with this fine book about how a Cold War mindset might again interfere with sensible U.S. foreign policymaking.