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

By Galen Jackson

In A Lost Peace, Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

During the June 1967 Middle East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US-Soviet relations.

The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain.

Jackson challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to scholars, Jackson reveals that the United States and the Soviet Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during the 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501769184

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

A Lost Peace

Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979

GALEN JACKSON

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Mom and Dad

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Deadlock

2. Toward a Breakthrough? Nixon, the War of Attrition, and a Shift in Soviet Policy

3. Waiting for 1973

4. Under the Cover of Détente

5. The Maximum Anti-Soviet Policy

6. A Peace Too Far? The Comprehensive Framework Collapses

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

The road to this book’s completion has been long. It has very much been a road worth taking, but the journey was by no means always easy, and I would not have been able to finish it without the enormous help of a number of organizations and amazing people. With that in mind, I hope that you, as the reader, will indulge me as I take some time to thank them.

For starters, I am indebted to a number of institutions that have generously supported my research over the years. While at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was fortunate to receive fellowships and grants from UCLA, the Bradley Foundation, the University of California’s Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Foundation. The Stanton Foundation awarded me a Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellowship, which allowed me to spend a year doing research in the Security Studies Program at MIT. Both the Stanley Kaplan Program in American Foreign Policy and the Clements Center for National Security gave me year-long postdoctoral fellowships, which enabled me to continue my work at Williams College and at the University of Texas at Austin, respectively. My appreciation for what these programs and institutions have done for me is enormous.

I am also grateful to have had the opportunity to build on my earlier research in this book. Portions of chapter 1 were previously published in my article The Johnson Administration and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking after June 1967, Middle East Journal 74, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 202–19. Parts of chapters 2 and 4 draw upon A Self-Inflicted Wound? Henry Kissinger and the Ending of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Diplomacy & Statecraft 32, no. 3 (September 2021): 554–78, which I co-authored with Marc Trachtenberg. Sections of chapters 4 and 5 draw upon my article The Showdown That Wasn’t: U.S.-Israeli Relations and American Domestic Politics, 1973–75, International Security 39, no. 4 (Spring 2015): 130–69. Portions of chapter 6 draw upon my article, Strategy and Two-Level Games: U.S. Domestic Politics and the Road to a Separate Peace, 1977–1978, Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 160–95. The book’s general argument draws partially upon my article Who Killed Détente? The Superpowers and the Cold War in the Middle East, 1969–77, International Security 44, no. 3 (Winter 2019/20): 129–62, as well as upon my chapter American Policy in the Middle East during the Cold War: Interests, Constraints, and Decision-Making, in The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations, ed. Tyson Reeder (New York: Routledge, 2021), 357–68.

The experience I have had working with the team at Cornell University Press has been nothing short of fantastic. I appreciate all of the work that Clare Jones put into getting the manuscript ready for production. For his part, Michael McGandy guided me through the process of getting the manuscript into publishable condition every step of the way. I was also fortunate to receive helpful feedback from an anonymous reviewer, for which I am grateful. Moreover, Stephen Walt gave me useful and detailed comments on the manuscript, from which I benefitted tremendously. The final manuscript was made much stronger by the constructive criticisms that he provided. In short, I feel fortunate that I was given a chance to work with the team at Cornell University Press. I would also like to thank Irina Burns for editing the manuscript and Mary Ribesky of Westchester Publisher Services for shepherding the project through production.

I have also had the good fortune of being able to work with some incredibly intelligent and generous individuals throughout the process of writing this book. My interest in the Middle East stems largely from the mentorship of Magnús Bernhardsson at Williams College. At the University of Chicago, I not only had the opportunity to take courses with giants in the field, such as John Mearsheimer, but also to work closely with Michael Reese, who spent countless hours giving me advice. I consider myself lucky to have had those experiences. I am also grateful to all of the people who helped me while at UCLA, and especially to Art Stein, Debbie Larson, Steven Spiegel, and Rob Trager. Likewise, I am grateful to Barry Posen, Owen Cote, and Vipin Narang for giving me the opportunity to spend a year at MIT and for welcoming me so warmly to the Security Studies Program. I owe Frank Gavin—who has helped me since the day I met him—a special debt for his support, both during and after the year I was at MIT. I have nothing but fond memories of my time at the Clements Center at UT-Austin, and I thank Will Inboden for both giving me the chance to work there and for all the help he has given me over the years. I also want to thank Leopoldo Nuti for all of his advice and support. Last but not least, William Quandt has been incredibly generous with his time whenever I have reached out to him with substantive questions relating to this book, something that I deeply appreciate.

I finished this book after coming back to Williams, this time as a professor in the political science department. It has been a special experience to become a colleague and friend of individuals who were previously my teachers. I am extremely grateful to Sam Crane, Justin Crowe, Laura Ephraim, Cathy Johnson, Michael MacDonald, Jim Mahon, Nicole Mellow, Ngoni Munemo, Nimu Njoya, Darel Paul, Mark Reinhardt, Sid Rothstein, Cheryl Shanks, Matt Tokeshi, and Mason Williams for being such wonderful colleagues and for making the department such a great place to work. I thank the department’s administrative assistant, Sarah Campbell-Copp, for all the help she has given me since I began working at Williams.

One of the most special parts of this journey has been the friendships that I have formed. At UCLA, I made an incredible group of friends that included Jesse Acevedo, Soumi Chatterjee, Paasha Mahdavi, Steve Palley, and Ryan Weldzius. That on its own made my time there well spent. At MIT, I learned an enormous amount from spending time every day with Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Rohan Mukherjee, both of whom have given me valuable comments on my work over the years. At UT-Austin, I had the good fortune of getting the chance to share an office with Evan McCormick, one of the nicest people I have ever met.

There are two people in particular whom I have been lucky to have as mentors and whose influence on me has been substantial. The first is James McAllister, whose class on the Vietnam War first made me think about pursuing a career in political science and focusing specifically on international security issues. He has been a major supporter of mine since that time, and I do not think there is any way that I can possibly repay the debt that I owe him for all of the help he has given me. It is my great fortune that I now get to work alongside him as a colleague. One of the absolute highlights of my professional career was getting to teach a course with him on US foreign policy after having been his student and having learned so much from him over the years.

The second person to whom I owe so much is Marc Trachtenberg. When I think about the best choices I have made, deciding to study at UCLA is high on the list because it gave me the opportunity to work with Marc. There is no way to describe the impact that he has had on me as both a scholar and a person, so I am not even going to try. Whenever I think about the sacrifices and challenges that were involved in going down this career path, I know that it was all worth it because of what I have gotten to learn from Marc. In addition to the unending support he has given me in my scholarly endeavors—I am somewhat embarrassed by the number of hours Marc has spent giving me comments on my work—I have been nothing short of astounded by his mentorship. What is more, at no point has Marc ever expected a thank you. As he likes to say, How can you expect to be thanked for something that you love doing? With that in mind, what I miss most about UCLA is being able to drop by Marc’s office and talk with him for hours on end. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that getting to work with students is now my favorite part of my job. For that, Marc deserves an enormous amount of credit. If I can do half as good a job as a mentor to my students as he did with me, I think I will have made a difference.

The people I owe the most to are my close friends and family. The full list is too long to include here, but I would like to specifically mention Dan Benz for being the best friend anyone could ask for. I have also been incredibly blessed to have four amazing sisters in Jenny, Vanessa, Madeleine, and Chessie, and I count my cousin Anna as a fifth. For the past six years, I have also been blessed to have the love and support of my wonderful partner, Jenn. As I write this, I know that completing this book would not have happened without them.

Above all, I want to thank my parents, Doug and Karen. I cannot put into words what they mean to me, nor can I describe just how much they have contributed to my growth as a person over the years. They have always loved and supported me no matter what, and getting to this point is as much their achievement as it is mine. This book is dedicated to them.

Abbreviations

Introduction

A Great Power Peace?

Many people view the Cold War as a natural political outcome. Conflict, they believe, was inevitable because the Soviets were so committed to their Communist ideology that any sort of accommodation between the superpowers was simply impossible. I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed at his first press conference in January 1981, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use. And because the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, Reagan declared, the Soviets, in effect, reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.¹

Others also see the Cold War as natural because of the anarchic structure of the international system, which they believe forces states to engage in intense security competition with one another. John Mearsheimer, one of the most prominent realist scholars in the field of international relations, maintains that cooperation between great powers is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain. Ultimately, he writes, great powers live in a fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other’s expense.²

These sorts of views are common among those who study the rise and decline of US-Soviet détente in the 1970s. Regardless of whether the superpowers could have reached a compromise in Europe during that period, Jonathan Haslam maintains: The tensions arising from ideological rivalry in the Third World would have continued to poison relations, above all, with the United States.… The revolutionary inheritance from Lenin was not so lightly cast aside despite [the] Comintern’s abolition. However reactionary in preferences, he believes, Soviet leaders were driven by the nature of the system to pursue the expansion of the revolution. Moscow, Haslam concludes, had no intention of ending the Cold War through compromise.³ The primary responsibility for the decline of détente, John Lewis Gaddis agrees, must rest with the Soviet Union. Whereas Washington was interested in developing a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, The Russians now believed it necessary to sustain [Marxist] governments, whatever the effect on the Soviet economy, on relations with the West, or on Moscow’s overall reputation in world affairs. As a result, [General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid] Brezhnev and his associates … could not bring themselves to refrain from exploiting opportunities as they arose.⁴ Until [Mikhail] Gorbachev, Ambassador Jack Matlock claims, we had a leadership that lied and cheated and they were almost impossible to deal with.… They simply weren’t willing to negotiate.⁵

Likewise, many writers maintain that the Soviets were bent on shifting the Cold War balance of power in their favor during this period. The 1970s, Stephen Sestanovich writes, "amounted to the realization of all major Soviet military and diplomatic desiderata."⁶ But according to Eugene Rostow, by 1978 it was obvious and beyond dispute that Moscow was engaged in a policy of imperial expansion all over the world, despite the supposedly benign influence of SALT I [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and its various commitments of cooperation to President [Richard] Nixon in the name of détente.⁷ To the USSR leaders, Adam Ulam wrote in 1976, détente did not imply that Moscow would refrain from extending its influence wherever it was safe and profitable for it to do so. It is probably genuinely incomprehensible to Brezhnev and his colleagues, he argued, that anyone can seriously believe that in 1976, détente places them under the same obligations it did in 1972.⁸ The conciliatory policies that the Americans pursued, Richard Pipes writes, were accompanied by a relentless military buildup and foreign intervention that culminated in the invasion of Afghanistan.⁹

Scholars make similarly unflattering claims about Soviet policy in the Middle East. Many analysts maintain that Moscow was determined to prevent a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict—and even to destroy the state of Israel—for both ideological and power political reasons. It was arguably the Soviet Union’s most important consideration, Alvin Rubinstein wrote in 1977, to keep Egypt from negotiating a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict lest this eliminate from the Middle East the festering problem that helped the Soviet Union intrude itself into the politics of the region.¹⁰ The Kremlin, one historian argues, aimed to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. The Soviet goal, he writes, was to bring about the destruction of the state of Israel in the 1970s or 1980s and with it the expulsion of almost two million Jews from the region.¹¹

But was the Cold War—and tension between the superpowers in the Middle East—really as natural as these analyses claim? Even at a basic conceptual level, one has to wonder whether this sort of conflict was inevitable. After all, both the United States and the Soviet Union had a strong interest in reaching an accommodation to avoid getting drawn into dangerous situations where their core political interests were not at stake, but which could nevertheless lead to a war between them. As even Kenneth Waltz—who tends to be skeptical about the ability of states to cooperate under international anarchy—once claimed, great powers have a substantial interest in maintaining the stability of the system as a whole. Great power, he writes, gives its possessors a big stake in their system and the ability to act for its sake. For them management becomes both worthwhile and possible. Waltz noted that both superpowers had a major incentive to manage areas whose instability may lead to their involvement and, through involvement, to war.¹² And by the 1970s, the Americans and Soviets had demonstrated their ability to work together in this fashion on some key issues.¹³

Did it really make sense, then, for the two sides to risk a major war, whether for ideological reasons or for the sake of unilateral—and essentially marginal—advantages? Would it not have made more sense for the two great powers to lower their sights somewhat and try to work with each other on a more businesslike basis, as classical realpolitik thinkers such as George Kennan would suggest, with the aim of reaching mutually acceptable agreements that took into account one another’s fundamental political interests?¹⁴ Particularly in situations where they shared similar objectives, did they not have a major incentive to cooperate?

My main aim in this book is to understand that basic issue—to get, in other words, at the whole question of how much this sort of thinking counts for in international politics—by closely examining the diplomacy of the Arab-Israeli dispute during the 1967–79 period. How much weight, in practice, did these sorts of considerations carry in shaping US and Soviet policies in the period that followed the June 1967 Middle East war?

When I began doing research for this book years ago, my starting assumption was that great powers should be expected to pursue policies that protect their core political interests. I imagined, in other words, that the United States and the Soviet Union would want to avoid situations that could lead to war—indeed, to a general war that might conceivably escalate to the nuclear level—and, in turn, that they had a common interest in cooperating to bring peace to the Middle East, a region that they both viewed as potentially explosive. In addition, I expected that the superpowers would want to work together because they, and especially the United States, had other key interests that were linked to an Arab-Israeli agreement, such as energy security, relations with important allies, and the long-term safety of Israel.¹⁵

Key US policy statements from this period embraced that basic philosophy. The Nixon administration’s State of the World reports are a good case in point. Any nation today, the 1970 report stated, must define its interests with special concern for the interests of others. If some nations define their security in a manner that means insecurity for other nations, then peace is threatened and the security of all is diminished. With that in mind, the Americans claimed to be prepared to put ideology to the side so that a structure of peace could be created, one built on a realistic accommodation of conflicting interests.¹⁶ The Nixon administration, in other words, would not make the internal order of the USSR … an object of [its] policy, but would instead relate to Moscow on the basis of its international behavior. And whereas adversaries had traditionally demonstrated a compulsion to seek every gain, however marginal, at the expense of their competitors, the Americans now claimed to believe that it was folly for the great nuclear powers to conduct their policies in this manner. For if they succeed, it can only result in confrontation and potential catastrophe.¹⁷ Thus, To the degree the USSR exercises its influence in the interest of restraint, the USSR and the U.S. could act on parallel courses.¹⁸

Likewise, the Nixon administration declared that it was interested in cooperating with Moscow in the Middle East. The superpowers, it claimed, had an obvious interest in not being dragged into a war in the region. With that in mind, when it came to the Arab-Israeli dispute: Each nation concerned must be prepared to subordinate its special interests to the interest of peace.¹⁹ Any effort by any major power to secure a dominant position, the Americans declared in 1971, could exacerbate local disputes, affect Europe’s security, and increase the danger to world peace. We seek no such position. The great powers, then, had to be free to pursue [their] own legitimate interests, but within the limits imposed by respect for the legitimate interests of others and the sovereignty of the nations of the area.²⁰ Thus, the administration stated that it was ready to work with the Soviet Union for peace and to work alongside the Soviet Union in cooperation with nations in the area in the pursuit of peace.²¹ The Americans claimed that a lasting settlement cannot be achieved unless the Soviet Union sees it to be in its interest. To subordinate our own hopes for global peace and a more stable relationship with the Soviet Union to the local … animosities of the Middle East was deemed intolerable.²² It certainly seemed like Washington was interested in cooperation.

But that is not what happened. In the end, the superpowers could not join efforts to get a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. Instead, the Middle East ultimately proved to be a key contributing factor to the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union to work out a stable détente relationship. That they were unable to cooperate is surprising, given the incentives that existed for them to do so, and raises an obvious question: How is that outcome to be understood?

In the simplest terms, that puzzle is this book’s focus. By using the Middle East as a kind of window, my goal is to comprehend why Washington and Moscow ultimately could not reach a fundamental accommodation during this period of the Cold War. I want to understand why the superpowers were unable to cooperate for Arab-Israeli peace, which might have served as the touchstone of a genuine US-Soviet détente.

To solve this puzzle, I had to answer two questions. First, I wanted to see whether US and Soviet decision makers did, in fact, consider a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement a desirable outcome, one that they believed would safeguard their most important political interests. And second, if they did, I wanted to find out why they failed to achieve that objective—to understand, in other words, what other factors came into play to prevent that shared interest in Middle East peace from resulting in a stable settlement.

The only way to answer those questions was through a close study of the relevant historical evidence which, in this case, is both massive and revealing. For example, much of the literature about this issue emphasizes the role that domestic politics, and in particular the Israel lobby, plays in shaping US policy toward the Arab-Israeli dispute.²³ But many analysts take it for granted that evidence about domestic politics will simply not appear in the official record. US policymakers, Fredrik Logevall writes, are loath to actually admit, especially on the printed page, that they can be influenced by personal or partisan political interest in their foreign policymaking. They wish at all cost to hide their ‘selfish drives’ in the historical record.²⁴ Certain types of theories, Elizabeth Saunders agrees, may be difficult to test because the evidence required is not often found in textual or other records. Domestic political explanations, for example, are notoriously difficult to trace because politicians do not like to admit, even in private, that such calculations enter into national security decisions.²⁵

But it turns out that when one examines the documentary record, discussions of domestic political considerations are common. The real problem, in fact, is not a paucity of evidence but an overabundance of it. The body of evidence from this period is so enormous that one can make a persuasive argument supporting whatever interpretation happens to comport with one’s predispositions. It would, for example, be quite easy to argue that US policy was more or less determined by domestic political considerations without misrepresenting a single document. Indeed, one could convincingly make that sort of claim because US leaders were pulled in multiple directions throughout this period, such that they expressed different views at different times and with different people.

What that means is that the evidence must be weighed with some care, not only to lay out the history accurately, but also to be able to reach fundamental conclusions about the overall thrust of US and Soviet policy. This makes for a somewhat messy story, but it is still possible to come up with some important answers to the questions that motivate this study. And in my view, there are some real problems with how the existing literature has dealt with this set of issues.

As detailed in the chapters that follow, it turns out that officials on both the US and Soviet sides did at various times think seriously about the strategic advantages of cooperating to try to bring peace to the Middle East. That sort of approach—a policy based on the kind of philosophy promoted by individuals such as Kennan—was an important aspect of the story, and one that earlier writers have failed to appreciate fully. One repeatedly finds evidence of decision makers on both sides reasoning in those terms as they tried to wrestle with this problem. But even though that sort of thinking played a role, it obviously was not enough to determine basic outcomes. The question, of course, is why?

Contrary to standard accounts, Soviet policy was fundamentally not the problem. I argue that by the middle of 1971 the USSR leadership was interested in a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement and wanted to cooperate with the United States to achieve that objective. Moscow’s vision of what a settlement should look like, moreover, was in line with the basic American concept. The Soviets, therefore, increasingly took pains to distance themselves from the Arabs with the aim of reaching a common position with the United States. One of the main reasons why the Soviets wanted to work with the Americans was to help develop a better overall relationship with Washington. Particularly after the October 1973 Middle East war, a real opportunity existed for the United States to work with the Soviet Union to get a fundamental Arab-Israeli agreement.

Nor do explanations having to do with US domestic politics and the Israel lobby provide a fully satisfying answer. To be sure, those sorts of factors were constantly on the minds of US officials and, at certain times, had a substantial impact on policy. One repeatedly sees evidence that they constrained decision makers as they tried to come up with solutions.

But in the final analysis, the domestic factor was not decisive. Although it was certainly a significant variable and, as such, merits careful attention in any fair analysis, the domestic political constraint was not insuperable, and US leaders had a number of opportunities during this period to try to overcome it—in fact, they strongly considered making a major political effort to do so on several occasions. The evidence suggests that if the problem was handled the right way—that is, if US officials employed effective tactics and timed their initiatives appropriately—there was a good chance that such a campaign might have succeeded. If certain key events in the story had gone somewhat differently, it seems likely that that is what would have happened.

The real issue, then, had to do with basic strategic calculations on the US side. It turns out that US decision makers—although they were tempted at points to respond favorably to Moscow’s proposals—were not interested in working with the Soviets, and instead sought to expel them from the Middle East, with the aim of making unilateral Cold War gains at their expense. Especially after the October 1973 war, Washington’s basic objective was not to work with the Soviets for a settlement but to undermine the USSR’s position in the region. Fundamentally, a Cold War mentality of reaching for unilateral advantage prevailed over a philosophy that called for the superpowers, in the interest of having more businesslike relations and respecting one another’s core political concerns, to put ideology to the side and work together in areas where their interests overlapped. Washington, consequently, might have missed an important opportunity not only to secure a stable and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement but also to reach a genuine political accommodation with Moscow in the 1970s.

I believe that these findings are of some importance in historical terms. They are, after all, at odds with the conventional wisdom about how the superpowers dealt with the Arab-Israeli issue during this period of the Cold War and the reasons for détente’s failure. But my hope is that these conclusions will be of interest not only to historians and scholars of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also to political scientists and other analysts who are interested in the more general question of how international politics fundamentally works.

CHAPTER 1

Deadlock

The Superpowers after the June 1967 War

On the morning of June 10, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson received an urgent message from Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin via the Washington-Moscow hotline. The Soviet leader was upset that Israel, which was at that very moment completing its conquest of the Syrian Golan Heights, had completely ignored the resolutions that had passed the United Nations (UN) Security Council calling for an end to the hostilities that had erupted between Jerusalem and its Arab neighbors six days earlier. A very crucial moment has now arrived, Kosygin warned, which forces us, if military actions are not stopped in the next few hours, to adopt an independent decision. If the Israelis did not halt their advance, he warned: Necessary actions will be taken, including military.¹

The situation was clearly serious. When top US officials met later that day, the atmosphere was tense, with those present speaking in low voices.² June 10, the US ambassador in Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, recounted, was a time of great concern and utmost gravity.³ Likewise, Johnson felt that the most awesome decisions he had taken since he came into office resulted from the Hot Line talks with Kosygin in matters relating to the crisis.⁴ The president ultimately ordered that the US Sixth Fleet be sent to the Eastern Mediterranean, a decision that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Richard Helms, later characterized as momentous.⁵

It seemed for a moment that the Arab-Israeli conflict might trigger a great power war. But did the fact that the Middle East posed this sort of threat not mean that the superpowers had a powerful incentive to cooperate to try to settle the issue by wielding their considerable influence with the parties to the dispute? Would one not expect both sides to pursue policies that supported their core interests? What interest did the Soviet Union have in going to war for the sake of its Arab clients, Egypt and Syria? As for the Americans, they had a fundamental interest in Israel’s security, but what interest did they have in supporting that country’s enlargement beyond the prewar boundaries, when pursuing that sort of policy was bound to poison US relations with the Arab world?

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the June 1967 war the United States and the Soviet Union found it hard to work together for Middle East peace. How is that result to be understood? Did US policymakers think that an Arab-Israeli settlement was strongly in Washington’s interest? Did the peace terms that the Americans had in mind make cooperation with the Soviets impossible? Even if they wanted a deal, did Johnson administration officials believe that the domestic political constraints they faced were such that they would not be able to put real pressure on Israel to accept a reasonable agreement? Did USSR policy so disproportionately favor the Arabs that US-Soviet cooperation was simply out of the question?

An Interest in Peace?

The Johnson administration quickly determined in the aftermath of the June 1967 conflict that the best way to serve US interests was to get an Arab-Israeli settlement. For starters, US strategists hoped to pursue a balanced policy in the region, one that would help prevent it from becoming divided into Cold War camps. We have learned over the years, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had written early in Johnson’s presidency, that the key to a constructive Near Eastern policy is maintaining a balance in our relationships with the Arabs and Israel. Becoming too closely identified with the latter, he reasoned, would not only destroy the influence we need to maintain with the Arabs but stimulate closer Arab-Soviet ties and reduce our ability to bring about an eventual peaceful solution to the Arab-Israel dispute.⁶ The Americans, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara agreed, had to try to avoid a polarization of the Arab-Israeli dispute along East-West lines.⁷ Our single greatest liability [in the region]—and one of the USSR’s greatest assets, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow similarly believed, is the sincere Arab belief that the ‘Zionists exercise a veto on US policy.’ ⁸

That consideration played a key role in shaping US thinking during the 1967 crisis. If the United States were to intervene directly, US officials reasoned, the result would be the ruination of the US position in the Arab world, to the ultimate benefit of the Soviet Union. As a May 1966 strategy paper, which was considered still good when the crisis arose a year later, put it: U.S. intervention on the side of Israel would risk intense polarization and increased Soviet influence in the Arab world.⁹ Even a less dramatic action, such as helping break the blockade that Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had imposed in the Gulf of Aqaba—the move that dramatically escalated the crisis—could not have been accomplished without significant damage. At best, US officials warned, that approach would further polarize Middle East politics, pitting the US and Israel against the USSR and all the Arab states, with the gravest political and economic damage to US and West European interests.¹⁰

A core US objective in postwar diplomacy, consequently, was to avoid becoming too closely aligned with Israel. The administration’s overriding consideration, Clark Clifford, who would replace McNamara in March 1968, believed, must be our avoiding a polarization of the Middle East in which a small Israel, backed by a U.S. with an ambiguous commitment, faces the Arabs, led by extremists and backed by a determined USSR.¹¹ What this sort of thinking implied was that the United States needed a stable settlement, one that would bolster its position in the Middle East and protect Israel’s core interests. Our only hope, Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow concluded, is that in the end we’ll get peace under our resolution and under our auspices, which ought to restore our position in the Middle East.¹²

The fact that the Persian Gulf had by this time emerged as an area of crucial significance in world energy markets was bound to reinforce this sort of thinking. To be sure, the attempt by the oil-producing Arab states to exert pressure on Washington during and after the war by embargoing supplies had basically failed, as the United States was still capable in 1967 of making up the shortfall from its own reserves.¹³ But the United States had important economic interests in the area and recognized that the implications of an oil cutoff could be quite serious, particularly for its European allies. On the eve of the crisis, Johnson had been keenly aware of our oil interests [in the Middle East].¹⁴ And during the conflict, Rusk pointed out that if the Arabs should do anything to cut off the flow of oil Europe would face a serious shortfall even with maximum supplies from the Western Hemisphere.¹⁵

Oil interests were, then, on the minds of US decision makers following the war. Perceptive analysts like Harold Saunders, a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff, recognized that the situation would likely get worse. "It is, he wrote in September, shortsighted to ignore the fact that Western Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on Middle East oil. There was, he observed, no avoiding the fact that the region was fast becoming the reservoir which the world must tap to make up the difference between supply and demand after all other suppliers are producing near capacity."¹⁶

In addition, it was more or less the unanimous belief among US officials that Israel would not be genuinely secure unless it could reach a settlement with the Arabs. Two and a half million Jews, McNamara believed, could not stand against the whole Arab world particularly if they were assisted by the Russians.¹⁷ Israel’s prime minister, Levi Eshkol, Rusk offered, should be thinking over the longer range problem of how tiny Israel could live in a sea of Arabs, but he seems unable to do this.¹⁸ Sitting on its present real estate, National Security Adviser Rostow agreed, won’t bring long-term security to Israel.¹⁹ A political solution, he believed, was "Israel’s only hope of survival in the long run."²⁰

Johnson felt the same way. At his talks with Eshkol in January, during which the prime minister pressed hard for the United States to sell Israel F-4 Phantom aircraft, the president repeatedly stressed that Israel needed a settlement to enjoy real security. Johnson regretted that the visit was so closely tied to the request for Phantoms. There are much broader problems. Phantoms won’t determine security. Planes won’t change things that basically. The big problem is how 2-1/2 million Jews can live in a sea of Arabs.²¹ As a result, the president was worried that the Eshkol government would present maximum demands and get feet in concrete.²²

But foremost in the minds of US policymakers was, as the June War had just vividly shown, that a major conflict in the Middle East would create difficult dilemmas for Washington. The United States had always resisted the idea of offering Israel a robust security guarantee. After all, it was assumed that adopting such a policy would not only critically damage the US position in the Arab world—to the ultimate benefit of the Soviet Union—but also be dangerous. It was precisely for these reasons that Johnson had acquiesced to Israel’s nuclearization.²³

Consequently, the administration had been anxious about the course events might take as the 1967 crisis escalated. The worst worry for McGeorge Bundy, the former national security adviser whom Johnson had asked to serve as his temporary consultant, had been that the Israelis might get into trouble militarily.²⁴ That outcome, he said, would have left the United States with a truly agonizing choice.²⁵ There was, National Security Adviser Rostow similarly recalled, a certain relief that things were going well for the Israelis. The administration, he explained, would not be put in a position of having to make a choice of engaging ourselves or seeing Israel thrown into the sea or defeated. That would have been a most painful moment and, of course, with the Soviet presence in the Middle East, a moment of great general danger.²⁶

But what if the war had taken a different course and the Israelis had gotten into trouble? Would the Americans have simply stood by and