We could not sit on the sidelines if the Middle East should rage out of control; the world would view it as a collapse of American authority, whatever alibi we might put forward. We had to protect our country’s ability to play an indispensable role as the guarantor of peace and the repository of the hopes of free peoples.
—HENRY A. KISSINGER
FOR NIXON AND KISSINGER THE liquidation of the Vietnam war was the precondition for the restoration of American international power. They regarded détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China as conducive to the revival of domestic and foreign beliefs in America’s dedication to peace and world order and in its “vision” (a favorite Kissinger word). It was in the Middle East, however, that Nixon and Kissinger could prove the capacity and will to use American power effectively during crises in the service of peace and order and by so doing, re-create international respect for the United States as a constructive and competent superpower.
Their principal Middle Eastern challenges—countering the Soviet buildup of Egyptian military power, controlling the Jordanian crisis of 1970, and stage-managing the termination of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war—provided both men with opportunities to manipulate the most awesome components of American power. In the 1973–1974 crisis period, as Nixon became more preoccupied with Watergate, Kissinger himself had to direct the major military as well as the political moves; and by all accounts he loved it.
The Nixon administration inherited the basic dilemma of U.S. Middle Eastern policy: by guaranteeing Israel’s security against Arab aggression, the United States had driven many countries into the arms of the Soviet Union and made it more difficult for pro-U.S. regimes in the area to sustain themselves in the face of radical domestic movements. But if the United States were to reduce its support for Israel, the Arabs, with Soviet backing, might soon come to believe they could overpower the small Jewish state. Yet preventing Arab attempts to crush Israel could require U.S. countermoves that would increase the likelihood of a U.S.-Soviet military clash.
Upon assuming the presidency, Nixon tried to transcend this dilemma by making the United States the active catalyst of the peace process in the Middle East. New initiatives were taken on two levels simultaneously: (1) intense U.S.-Soviet consultations designed to lock the Russians into a joint approach toward an Arab-Israeli settlement and (2) a new “evenhanded” posture toward the demands of the Israelis and the Arabs. Both were reflected in what came to be known as the Rogers Plan—the U.S. draft outline of an Arab-Israeli settlement presented by Secretary of State William P. Rogers to the Soviets for Kremlin endorsement as agreed-upon terms of reference for more specific peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt.
The starting point for the proposed negotiations was UN Resolution 242, an ambiguous set of principles passed by the Security Council on November 22, 1967, that both Israel and Egypt said they accepted. Resolution 242 called for a settlement based on “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent June 1967 conflict” and “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”1
Implementation of Resolution 242 had stalled during the last fourteen months of the Johnson administration, primarily over differing interpretations of the sequence of Israeli withdrawals and the full recognition of Israel’s legitimacy by the Arabs. The Arabs, backed by Soviets, insisted on withdrawal first, then peace. The Israelis, supported at least implicitly by the United States, regarded Arab acceptance of Israeli statehood as the necessary precondition for relinquishing territories Israel conquered during the last round of the war. The two sides also disagreed over how much of the conquered territory Israel was obligated to give back.
The most fully worked out version of the Rogers Plan,2 as presented to the Soviets on October 28, 1969, provided for indirect negotiations between Israel and Egypt and outlined the key provisions of the agreement that should ensue: (1) a timetable, to be agreed on during the negotiations, for withdrawal of Israeli forces from Egyptian territory occupied during the 1967 war; (2) a formal end to the state of war; (3) specification of the precise locations of the agreed-upon “secure borders” and the establishment of demilitarized zones; (4) freedom of navigation through the Strait of Tiran and an affirmation of its status as an international waterway; (5) nondiscriminatory navigation for the ships of all nations, including Israel, through the Suez Canal; (6) a final settlement of the Gaza Strip issue; (7) participation in a process for resolving the Palestinian refugee problem; (8) mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty, political independence, and right to live in peace within secure boundaries free from threats of force; and (9) submission of the final document to the UN Security Council for ratification, and to the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, which would promise to help both sides adhere to the agreement.3
But Israel flatly rejected the “attempt to impose a forced solution on her … [and] appease them [the Arabs] at the expense of Israel.”4 The Soviets, unable to deliver the Egyptians, also rejected the Rogers Plan.
In retrospect, Nixon claimed to have known that the provisions for returning the occupied territories to the Arabs meant that the Rogers Plan had absolutely no chance of being accepted by Israel. “I knew that the Rogers Plan could never be implemented,” wrote Nixon,
but I believed that it was important to let the Arab world know that the United States did not automatically dismiss its case regarding the occupied territories or rule out a compromise settlement of the conflicting claims. With the Rogers Plan on record, I thought it would be easier for the Arab leaders to propose reopening relations with the United States without coming under attack from the hawks and pro-Soviet elements in their own countries.5
THE SAM CRISIS
In January 1970, the Israeli air force began to step up its raids on Egypt in retaliation for persisting Egyptian forays across the canal. Raw balance of power calculations once again dominated the Middle Eastern scene and the deliberations in the White House. On January 31 Nixon received what Kissinger termed the “first Soviet threat” of his administration—a letter from Premier Aleksei Kosygin stating that “we would like to tell you in all frankness that if Israel continues its adventurism, to bomb the territory of the UAR and other Arab states, the Soviet Union will be forced to see to it that the Arab states have the means at their disposal, with the help of which a due rebuff to the arrogant aggressor could be made.”6
Nixon’s reply to the threatening Kosygin letter was firm but by his own characterization “carefully low-keyed.” He warned that increased Soviet arms shipments would draw the major powers more deeply into the conflict, but also proposed U.S.-Soviet discussions on limiting arms supplies to the Middle East.7 Meanwhile, he postponed responding to Israel’s requests for new jet aircraft deliveries. But in the spring of 1970 the situation was deteriorating too rapidly both on the superpower level and on Israel’s border to be arrested by benign pleas for cooperation. In April U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources picked up signs not only that the Soviets were accelerating their deliveries of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), supersonic jets, and tanks to Egypt but also that Soviet military personnel were beginning to man some of the SAM sites and fly some of the planes. Nixon ordered a full investigation of the expanding Soviet role and quietly stepped up the flow of U.S. military supplies to Israel; but he still held back on approving delivery of the supersonic planes the Israelis now urgently demanded.8
As the situation along the Suez became more threatening to Israel, Nixon played on Israeli entreaties for a more forthcoming U.S. response to its military equipment requirements by asking the Israelis to exhibit more flexibility in their terms for a settlement. At the end of May, Prime Minister Golda Meir reiterated Israel’s acceptance of Resolution 242 and agreed that it should be the basis of indirect talks between Israel and the UAR. Washington next pressed for an Arab-Israeli cease-fire while talks between the Israelis and Egyptians were conducted under the auspices of UN special ambassador Gunnar Jarring. To overcome Israeli fears that a cease-fire would only be exploited by the Russians and Arabs to further strengthen Arab military capabilities, Nixon assured Meir that the United States would continue its arms deliveries at whatever level was needed to prevent a shift in the local balance of power; to that end, in early July he authorized the shipment of electronic countermeasure (ECM) equipment for Israeli jets to help Israel overcome the Soviet SAMs in the canal zone.9
The Israelis were not at all pleased with these marginal and temporizing responses to their requests for decisive U.S. diplomatic and military backing. They feared the Arabs would use the cease-fire not as the Americans hoped, as a transition to a negotiated peace, but rather as additional time for completing their military buildup while forestalling delivery of a major new round of U.S. military supplies to Israel.
The strongest statement of American intentions during this period came from Kissinger in a June 26 background briefing at San Clemente. “We are trying to get a settlement in such a way that the moderate regimes are strengthened, and not the radical regimes,” he told a group of newspaper editors. “We are trying to expel the Soviet military presence, not so much the advisers, but the combat pilots and combat personnel, before they become so firmly established.”10
Egypt was the first to accept the American cease-fire proposal, followed by Jordan. Israel reluctantly acquiesced during the first week of August 1970. The cease-fire was supposed to last three months and to include a military standstill in a zone thirty-two miles wide on each side of the Suez Canal.
But the Israelis almost immediately began to report Egyptian violations of the truce, in the form of a continuing movement of SAM batteries into the standstill zone. U.S. reconnaissance flights soon confirmed that the Egyptians were indeed systematically introducing new missile launchers into the prohibited area. On August 22 the administration informed the Soviet Union and Egypt that it had “incontrovertible evidence” that at least fourteen missile sites had been modified between August 15 and August 27.11 Nixon now decided to sell Israel at least eighteen of the F-4 supersonic aircraft it had requested. He also ordered rush deliveries to Israel of the latest ECM equipment and conventional Shrike air-to-ground missiles so the Israeli air force could neutralize the SAMs.
At least as important as the resumption of a major flow of U.S. military supplies to Israel was the impact of the Soviet-Egyptian violations of the canal zone truce on the Nixon administration’s general policy. At Kissinger’s urging and over the objections of Secretary of State Rogers, there was now a decided tilt toward the Israelis and a new sympathy for the Meir government’s reluctance to make territorial concessions in advance of public and tangible commitments from Egypt indicating plans to live in peace with the Jewish state. Nixon and Kissinger also were freshly determined to reduce Soviet influence over the Arabs and were on the lookout for opportunities to demonstrate American coercive power in the region.12
An opportunity to flex America’s muscles emerged in September 1970, a month of maximum trauma for King Hussein of Jordan, friend of the United States and interlocutor for Prime Minister Golda Meir with Israel’s Arab adversaries.
King Hussein was not only the most pro-Western of Arab leaders but also the most cooperative when it came to working for a compromise Arab-Israeli peace. As a consequence he was on the enemies list of the militant anti-Israelis in the region, particularly the Palestinian commando organizations that wanted to use Jordan’s western border areas as a staging ground for raids into Israel. Moreover, many of the radical Palestinians living in Jordan were determined to destroy the Hussein regime and make Jordan the center of their drive to regain the Palestinian lands controlled by Israel and to push the Jews into the sea.
On September 6, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a TWA plane and a Swissair plane and forced them to land on a airstrip in Jordan twenty-five miles from the capital, Amman. A third airliner was captured and flown to Cairo, where its passengers were unloaded just before the plane was blown up. Still another plane, a BOAC jet, was hijacked the next day and also flown to the Jordanian airstrip, giving the PFLP a total of 475 hostages, many of them Americans, in Jordan. The hijackers threatened to blow up the three planes with their passengers aboard unless all Palestinian and pro-Palestinian prisoners in Israel, West Germany, Britain, and Switzerland were released. Beyond this ostensible purpose, the PFLP motive seemed to be to humiliate the Jordanian monarchy, paving the way for a Palestinian takeover of the government in Amman. King Hussein was in a double bind: if he failed to move decisively, the Jordanian army might take matters into its own hands, thereby undercutting his authority. Yet he was reluctant to order the army to storm the airstrip, apparently not so much out of fear that the hostages would be killed as out of anxiety that Syria or Iraq might move forces into Jordan on behalf of the Palestinians.13
Hussein’s dilemma, however, meshed with Nixon’s determination to show resolve and to inject the United States more directly into the Middle East as a counter to the increasing Soviet involvement. United States paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division were placed on semi-alert status; a fleet of C-130 air transports was dispatched to Turkey under an escort of F-4 jet fighters for possible use in evacuating the Americans from Jordan; and units of the Mediterranean Sixth Fleet were ordered to sail toward the coasts of Israel and Lebanon.
On September 12, six days after the hijackings began, the PFLP transferred the hostages to some of their camps and blew up the three empty planes. In exchange for an Israeli agreement to release 450 Palestinian prisoners, the hijackers began releasing the hostages but continued to hold 55 Jewish passengers.14
Three days later what had started out as an extortionary ploy exploded into a raging international crisis with the risk of a direct U.S.-Soviet clash. While holding the hostages in the desert, the PFLP stepped up terrorist attacks against the royal forces. On September 15 the king replaced his civilian officials with a military government, signaling his decision to move in force against the guerrilla strongholds. Jordan was now in a state of civil war.
The immediate question in Washington was whether Syria and Iraq would intervene. The intelligence community tended to discount the likelihood of such intervention, but Nixon spoke and acted as if he considered it imminent. On September 16, in an off the record briefing to a group of midwestern newspaper editors, he said that the United States might have to intervene if Syria or Iraq threatened Hussein. The Chicago Sun Times published some of the president’s remarks and, surprisingly, was complimented by Nixon for breaking the ground rules. Clearly, Nixon wanted his implied warning to be picked up not only in Arab capitals but also in Moscow. Similar intense concern and hints of U.S. involvement were expressed by Kissinger and Under Secretary of State Joseph Sisco in background briefings that the press could attribute to “administration officials.”15 The verbal signaling was underscored by a set of military decisions: The aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy was ordered into the Mediterranean and the helicopter carrier Guam, loaded with 1,500 marines, dispatched from Norfolk, Virginia, in the direction of the Middle East. Nixon also authorized half a billion dollars in military aid for Israel and an acceleration of fighter aircraft deliveries.16 “We would not allow Hussein to be overthrown by a Soviet-inspired insurrection,” Nixon recollected in his memoir. “If it succeeded, the entire Middle East might erupt in war; the Israelis would almost certainly take pre-emptive measures against a Syrian-dominated radical government in Jordan; the Egyptians were tied to Syria by military alliances; and Soviet prestige was on the line. … The possibility of a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation was uncomfortably high. It was like a ghastly game of dominoes, with a nuclear war waiting at the end.”17
On September 18 Kissinger was informed by both the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Jordanian ambassador, Abdul Hamid Sharaf, that Syrian tanks had crossed into Jordan and were headed toward the city of Irbid. Kissinger had Sisco check with the Russians, who offered their assurances that the Syrians had not invaded Jordan. And the State Department received a communication from Moscow telling of the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent any outside intervention by Jordan’s neighbors.
The next day the White House received firmer evidence that the Syrians had indeed invaded, and it was not a small probe. Some hundreds of tanks were now rolling toward Irbid. Kissinger is reported to have been furious at the Soviets for attempting to deceive him and the president. The Kremlin must have been aware of what was happening and perhaps had even urged the Syrians on, for Syrian tank units were known to have Soviet military advisers. Kissinger reported on the fast-breaking crisis to the president and recommended an alert of American forces. Nixon agreed and ordered a selective alert of American troops in the United States and Western Europe. The Sixth Fleet was also augmented, and the ships with marine corps fighting units aboard steamed ominously toward the coasts of Israel and Lebanon. These military moves were coupled with U.S. warnings to the Russians that if the Syrians did not withdraw from Jordan, the Israelis might intervene and the United States itself might not be able to stay out.18
On September 20 and 21, the Syrians continued to pour military forces into Jordan. Either the U.S. countermoves had not registered or Damascus, with Moscow’s backing, had determined the Americans were bluffing. But in truth Nixon and Kissinger were deadly serious. Additional U.S. military forces in Germany were placed on alert, and transport planes were readied to airlift them to the Middle East. The augmented Sixth Fleet moved in closer. As an indicator of U.S.-Israeli coordination, a small U.S. intelligence aircraft flew back and forth between the advance naval units and Tel Aviv, with the USSR obviously watching.
Finally, on September 22, emboldened by confidence that Israel would indeed join the battle and would be backed by the United States, Hussein threw his own ground and air forces fully against the Syrians. The crisis suddenly broke. Syrian tanks turned around and moved back toward Syria.19 Triumphant, Nixon flew to Rome a few days later and spent a night on the aircraft carrier Saratoga in the Mediterranean to symbolize his renewed pride in the potency of American military power as a diplomatic instrument.
From the fall of 1970 until October 1973, the administration’s bedrock assumption was that war was a wholly unattractive alternative to the Egyptians as long as Israel maintained effective superiority and there was a good prospect that it would return the occupied territories as a result of international political pressure. Egypt and Syria might threaten war from time to time, but this was only a ploy to intensify the international pressure on Israel to make concessions.
The premises may have been correct; but even so, they begged the question of how Egypt might assess the pertinent military balance at any time, which would include its judgments about the willingness of other countries to come to the aid of the belligerents in case of war. They also left as a variable the degree of Egyptian optimism concerning Israel’s willingness to part with territory. In the final analysis the probability of a new Mideast war was to a large extent determined by highly subjective Egyptian judgments that could shift in response to the dynamic political and military situation.
Another potentially unstable variable was Soviet policy. Kissinger and Nixon, however, assumed the Soviets were firmly opposed to a new round of war between Arabs and Israelis. The Kremlin might still be attempting to gain influence among the Arabs from a no-war-no-peace situation, but a hot war could draw in the USSR and the United States on opposite sides, and this might spell the end of their détente begun in 1972. Brezhnev was thought to have too much at stake in détente to put it at risk on behalf of his Middle Eastern clients. As the military supplier of Egypt and Syria, he was in a position to pull in the reins on any reckless action they might contemplate. The possibility that Soviet policy might be catalyzed by indigenous Middle Eastern factors rather than the other way around was presumably discounted in the White House.
Thus, the general orientation of those at the highest levels of the U.S. government was responsible for the misreading and underweighting of a series of specific developments—of which U.S. intelligence agencies were cognizant—that in retrospect look like inexorable moves toward the October 1973 war:20
• On November 14, 1972, Anwar Sadat promised the Higher Council of his Arab Socialist Union Party that Egypt would attack Israel sometime within the coming twelve months.
• During the winter of 1972–73, Egypt and the USSR seemed to be repairing the rift that had led Sadat to expel all Soviet military advisers and experts the previous July and to place all Soviet bases and equipment in Egypt under exclusive Egyptian control. Egypt now invited back several hundred Soviet military advisers and allowed the Russians once again to use military facilities in Egypt. In return, Brezhnev agreed to substantially increase the flow of Soviet military equipment to Egypt, this time including the advanced SAM-6 mobile antiaircraft missile. The deliveries also included bridge-building equipment.
• In the spring, Sadat began a series of intensive consultations with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who in recent months had been hinting strongly that he was ready to use his oil assets as a political weapon against the friends of Israel, and with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the most prominent war hawk in the Arab camp.
• In June, reports reached Washington of a massive acceleration of Soviet arms deliveries to Syria, including late-model T-62 tanks, sophisticated antitank missiles, SAMSs, and MIG-21 fighters.
• In the second week of September 1973, King Hussein of Jordan flew to Cairo for a summit meeting with Sadat and Assad. Reports on the meeting indicated that war contingencies were discussed.
• During the last week of September, CIA reports to Kissinger spotlighted a number of unusual Egyptian, Syrian, and Soviet military movements. The annual Egyptian military maneuvers (which Kissinger later mentioned in his October 12 news conference) were being conducted with full divisions of Egyptian troops this time. Not only were the Egyptians stockpiling more ammunition and logistical support than ever before; they were also setting up a field communications network more complicated than mere maneuvers would require. The CIA analysts pointed to simultaneous suspicious deployments of Syrian tanks out of their normal defensive formations. United States’ surveillance also detected three Soviet freighters on their way to Egypt, possibly loaded with surface-to-surface missiles that could hit Israeli cities from Egyptian territory. Similar ominous movements were picked up by Israeli intelligence sources.
Then, suddenly, a Palestinian terrorist ambush of Soviet Jews headed through Austria on their way to Israel made Kissinger jittery. He expressed great concern that the Israeli government—outraged and frustrated at the Austrian chancellor’s capitulation to the terrorists’ demand that in return for releasing the hostages Austria close some facilities it had made available to transiting Jewish emigrés—might retaliate by attacking Palestinian camps throughout the Arab Middle East. This, Kissinger feared, could set off a cycle of violence that could expand quickly into all-out war; and he warned the Israeli ambassador of the consequences.
As reports poured in on the intense military posturing now being undertaken by the potential belligerents, Kissinger feared above all a major Israeli preemptive strike, in the mode of its lightning raids at the outset of the 1967 war, to hobble the Syrian and Egyptian war machines; but Israeli officials assured him they were not going to strike first this time. The secretary of state still refused to believe that Egypt and its allies might be planning to start a war as a deliberate act of policy. Even when Kissinger was informed on the night of October 4 that Soviet dependents were being evacuated from Cairo and Damascus, he interpreted this as perhaps another indication of difficulties between the Soviets and their Arab hosts. His intelligence advisers, while disagreeing with this interpretation, still were not ready to predict war.
During the 48 hours preceding hostilities, with evidence from various sources confirming that the Syrian and Egyptian forward armored units were swinging into offensive formations, Kissinger received further assurances by telephone from Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Israel would not preempt. The American ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, allegedly underscored Kissinger’s views in warning his hosts that only if there was irrefutable proof that the Arabs were the aggressors would the United States consider itself morally obligated to help the Israelis.21 In his memoirs Kissinger denies the allegation by Golda Meir among others that the United States brought great pressure against the Israelis not to preempt in October 1973. He admits having expressed the view in years past to Israeli officials that U.S. support would be impaired if Israel struck first. But as the Yom Kippur War approached, insists Kissinger, all the statements forswearing preemption were initiated by the Israelis themselves.22
Regardless of the exact nature of the intense conversations between American and Israeli officials on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, Prime Minister Meir evidently believed that if Israel struck a preemptive blow, it would have to fight alone; and therefore, against the advice of Israel’s military chief of staff, she decided to allow her country to accept the first blows. The Arabs struck massively and simultaneously from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south on Yom Kippur morning, October 6, while many Israelis were attending religious services. It was a well-planned, well-coordinated, and efficiently executed attack.
The immediate physical losses suffered by Israel for letting the Arabs strike first were large; but Israel’s ultimate gain was presumably of larger significance: namely, a clear moral claim on the United States for support of Israel as a victim of aggression. As it turned out, however, this moral claim had less currency in the White House than the Israelis had been led to believe.
The U.S. leaders, as should have been expected, would always put their own priorities first, and the resumption of hostilities once again made it plain that these were (1) to avoid a major war between the United States and the Soviet Union; (2) to ensure the survival of Israel (whatever Nixon’s and Kissinger’s private views, they knew that it would be political suicide to allow Israel to be destroyed); (3) to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting the conflict to enlarge its influence in the Middle East; and (4) to conduct U.S. diplomacy in the region in such a way as to enhance the regional and global prestige of the United States and to increase domestic support for the Nixon administration. None of these interests required unequivocal U.S. support for Israel’s war aims or the underwriting of its military strategy. Rather, Nixon and Kissinger, in assessing the new situation brought about by the onset of war, seemed—to the shock and dismay of the Israelis—to be moving back to the evenhanded approach they had flirted with prior to the 1970 Jordanian crisis.
The White House made no public condemnation during the 1973 war of either the Arabs or the Soviet Union. Kissinger articulated the objectives of U.S. crisis diplomacy as “first, to end hostilities as quickly as possible—but secondly, to end hostilities in a manner that would enable us to make a major contribution to removing the conditions that have produced four wars between Arabs and Israelis in the last 25 years.”23
Kissinger operated under the assumption—not publicly articulated—that these objectives could not be attained if either side achieved a clear military victory in the hostilities. It was Kissinger’s adoption of this assumption, particularly where it looked as if the Israelis might be attempting to conquer more territory than they obtained in 1967, that made him look anti-Israeli to many Israelis and their friends—not to mention the reputation he had gained with many Americans for perfidy and duplicity. Indeed, much of Kissinger’s most controversial behavior—his procrastination in moving military supplies to Israel, the timing of his demands for a cease-fire in place, and especially his pressures on the Israelis to free the surrounded Egyptian Third Army—would seem fickle, if not irrational, without this premise.24
The most detailed account (other than Kissinger’s own) of the considerations Kissinger brought to bear on the crucial decisions of the U.S. government during the 1973 war is provided by William Quandt. A member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff, Quandt attended most of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) meetings that Kissinger used as the basic sounding board for exploring and choosing among his options.
According to Quandt, at the outbreak of hostilities Kissinger expected a short war in which Israel would prevail. He was worried, however, that if the Israelis once again began to humiliate the Arabs, the Soviets would find it difficult to stay out. Urgent diplomatic initiatives therefore were required to ensure that a cease-fire was reestablished on the basis of the territorial status quo prevailing before October 6. The cooperation of the Soviets would be essential in getting the Arabs to return to the status quo ante, so it was of vital importance that the Soviets understand that the United States would not countenance any new Israeli territorial expansion. Accordingly, Nixon sent Brezhnev a letter urging mutual restraint and the convening of the UN Security Council, while Kissinger pressed the case with his counterparts in the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Israel for a cease-fire based on the status quo ante. Otherwise, the United States kept a low profile during the first few days of the war.
Egypt and Syria, with major military units still in the territory they wished to reconquer, were not ready to accede to the cease-fire proposal. Kissinger was confident that once the tide of battle turned against the Arabs they would change their tune, especially if Israel began to cross the canal into Egypt and move beyond the Golan Heights in Syria.
Between the third and sixth days of the war, the WSAG’s assessments of the military prospects changed. Israel was finding it difficult to turn back the Arab assault. Suffering heavy losses of aircraft, the Israelis urgently appealed for more American arms and were informed that additional shipments had been approved, including a number of Phantom jets that would soon be on their way. It became impossible to ascertain who was gaining the upper hand as the Israelis launched a smashing counteroffensive on the Syrian front and began bombing Damascus. Assad and Sadat were putting great pressure on King Hussein of Jordan to open up a third front against Israel.
Kissinger’s response to the rapidly developing military situation was to call for a cease-fire in place. Golda Meir immediately refused this revised proposal, insisting that any cease-fire must be tied to the restoration of the territorial dispositions prevailing before Yom Kippur. Sadat was cool to the Kissinger proposal, demanding concrete Israeli commitments to relinquish all land captured in 1967 as the condition for a cease-fire. The Soviets, while not rejecting the cease-fire and indicating willingness to cooperate with the United States on the diplomatic front, now began a major airlift of arms to the Syrians.
The Israelis pressed their case for accelerated U.S. arms deliveries with greater persistence. Kissinger blamed the Defense Department for the sluggish implementation of the arms resupply effort. The temporizing on the Israeli arms request was consistent, however, with the Kissinger strategy of not having the United States emerge as Israel’s ally in opposition to the Arabs and pressuring the Israelis to accept a cease-fire in place.25
Meanwhile, the shifting fortunes of the belligerents in the war itself were producing a shift in their attitudes toward a cease-fire in place. To the Israelis, who were once again on the military offensive and hopeful of more than regaining their lost ground, the idea began to look more attractive, especially if its actual implementation could be delayed for a few days, while to the Arabs it began to look more and more like a trap. On October 12 the Israeli government, still bargaining hard for maximum assurances of American arms supplies, accepted the principle of a cease-fire in place. Now Sadat was unequivocally opposed.
Kissinger and Nixon, frustrated by the Egyptian leader’s rejection of a cease-fire in place, suspecting that the Soviets were encouraging him to dig in his heels, and feeling the need to counter the Soviet airlift of supplies to Syria, were determined to change the Soviet-Arab calculations of gains from allowing the war to continue. Nixon authorized an acceleration and expansion of the delivery of Phantoms and ordered the U.S. military to fly the aircraft and other equipment directly into Israel. The principal purpose was to demonstrate to Sadat and the Kremlin that any prolongation of the war could not possibly operate to the military advantage of the Arabs—despite the flow of Soviet arms, which the United States could easily match. Nor could it be to their political advantage, for it would make it more difficult for the United States to convince Israeli hawks that the Arabs were sincerely interested in an equitable peace. A collateral purpose undoubtedly was to show the Russians, once again, that they would only be embarrassed if they attempted unilaterally to change the balance of military power in the Middle East.
With the American airlift under way, the Israelis launched into a climactic hard-driving offensive on both fronts. The Syrians were decisively thrown off the Golan Heights and pushed back along the Damascus road. To the south the Israeli troops crossed over to the west bank of the Suez Canal in a maneuver designed to encircle the Egyptian troops still in the Sinai peninsula and cut off their line of retreat back over the canal into Egypt. In a matter of days, Israel was decisively in control of the military situation around its extended borders. Now the Soviets sent out anxious calls for a cease-fire.
Brezhnev invited Kissinger to come to Moscow for “urgent consultations.” The moment for a cease-fire might have arrived. Kissinger’s premise that it would be counterproductive for the Israelis to humiliate the Arabs had not altered. He left for Moscow on October 20 with his bargaining position strengthened by a presidential request to Congress for $2.2 billion in emergency military aid for Israel.
En route to Moscow, Kissinger received the news of the momentous Saudi Arabian decision to embargo oil shipments to the United States. Not only were the relative bargaining weights on each side of the Arab-Israeli conflict changed thereby, but as Kissinger was to discover in the months and years ahead, so was the overall world power equation out of which Kissinger had fashioned his realpolitik concepts.
The Kissinger-Brezhnev meeting in Moscow on October 21 produced an agreed-upon superpower approach to an Arab-Israeli truce: a cease-fire resolution to be presented to the UN Security Council that would call for a simple cease-fire in place and negotiations between the parties; and an eventual peace conference, to be chaired by both the United States and the Soviet Union. In effect, the superpowers were agreeing to act jointly to compel their respective clients to stop the fighting.
Despite the Israeli government’s protest that it was not adequately consulted, the United States joined the Soviet Union in presenting their agreed-upon text of a cease-fire resolution to the United Nations the very next morning. And after less than three hours’ deliberation by the Security Council, Resolution 338 was adopted by a vote of 14 to 0 (China did not vote). The October 22 resolution was a brief but specific statement:
The Security Council:
1. Calls upon all parties to the present fighting to cease all firing and terminate all military activity immediately, no later than 12 hours after the moment of the adoption of this decision, in the positions they now occupy;
2. Calls upon the parties concerned to start immediately after the cease-fire the implementation of Security Council resolution 242 (1967) in all of its parts;
3. Decides that, immediately and concurrently with the cease-fire, negotiations start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.26
The parties stopped shooting six hours after the Security Council passed its resolution, but not without some arm-twisting by both superpowers. Neither Israel nor Egypt was in a position to object too strongly. Israel was now in military control of more territory than before the war started and was in a strong bargaining position. Egypt was reeling from the Israeli counteroffensive and would probably lose even more ground if a cease-fire were delayed any longer. Syria, too, recognized the new realities and accepted the cease-fire the next day.
Almost immediately after the formal cessation, however, there were charges and countercharges of violations of the truce. Who was responsible was of less concern to Kissinger, however, than the fact that the Israelis were exploiting the opportunity to extend their presence on the Egyptian side of the canal, putting them in a position to capture the city of Suez and completely encircle the 100,000-man Egyptian Third Army Corps.
The new Israeli military thrusts and their noose-tightening around the Egyptian Third Army precipitated a new crisis for Kissinger as the Soviets indicated an intention to intervene directly with their own forces to enforce the cease-fire. Kissinger’s response—one of the most daring of his career—was to threaten counteraction against both the Israelis and the Soviets. He would show the Russians that the United States could yet control the Israelis and that therefore Soviet intervention was unnecessary to prevent total humiliation of the Arabs; and he would show the Israelis (and the rest of the world) that the United States still had the will and the power to deter a direct Soviet intervention, but only if the Israelis themselves acted with reasonable restraint.
Kissinger’s reasons for insisting on Israeli restraint went beyond the imperative of preventing Soviet intervention. Now, with the Arab oil embargo in effect, it was more than ever important for the United States to demonstrate the capacity to separate itself from the more extreme Israeli actions and to act as an honest broker in the region on behalf of an equitable peace. Accordingly, Kissinger had resolved to at least prevent the Israelis from strangling the Egyptian Third Army Corps, even before the Soviets threatened to intervene.27 After the Soviet intervention had been deterred, Kissinger insisted that at a minimum, the Israelis permit humanitarian convoys of food, water, and medical supplies to the surrounded Egyptian soldiers. He hinted that if the Israelis attempted to prevent this, the United States would itself convoy the supplies and threatened to vote in favor of an anti-Israeli resolution the Arabs had introduced in the UN Security Council. Still the Israelis were not about to give up their advantage. The impasse was finally overcome by Sadat’s acceptance of direct military talks between Israeli and Egyptian generals at kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road to implement the UN cease-fire/disengagement resolution—this in exchange for Israel’s permission for a nonmilitary convoy to bring supplies to the Egyptian Third Army under UN and Red Cross supervision.28
The threat of Soviet intervention had emerged obliquely. On October 24 President Sadat appealed to the United States and the Soviet Union to send a joint U.S.-Soviet peacekeeping force to police the cease-fire. Kissinger immediately rejected the idea. Soviet troops in the Middle East could only spell additional trouble, with or without a U.S. counterpresence. That night Ambassador Dobrynin phoned Kissinger with a “very urgent” message from Secretary General Brezhnev to President Nixon—so urgent, said Dobrynin, that he must read it over the phone to Kissinger. “Let us act together,” said Brezhnev, and “urgently dispatch Soviet and American contingents to Egypt” in order to “compel the observance of the cease-fire without delay.” The Soviet leader also went beyond the Sadat proposal with a threat that Nixon later described as the most serious to U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cuban missile crisis: “I will say it straight,” Brezhnev warned, “that if you find it impossible to act together with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally. Israel cannot be allowed to get away with the violations.”29
U.S. intelligence agencies meanwhile were picking up signs of Soviet military movements—“a plethora of indicators,” according to Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, that Soviet airborne divisions in the southern USSR and Hungary had been placed on alert. More Soviet ships had entered the Mediterranean, and some unconfirmed reports suggested that they might be carrying nuclear warheads for the missiles sent to Egypt earlier in the year.30
While unsure of what the Soviets were really up to—was it a symbolic show of resolve? a bluff? an actual deployment of major military units?—Kissinger acted swiftly to put the Kremlin on notice that any unilateral introduction of Soviet military force into the area at this time would risk a dangerous confrontation with the United States. A toughly worded presidential rejection of Brezhnev’s proposals and demands was conveyed to the Kremlin. U.S. forces around the world were put on an intermediate DEFCON (defense condition) level, bringing the Strategic Air Command and other units to a higher than normal state of readiness. The 82nd Airborne Division was prepared for possible dispatch. And the aircraft carriers Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were ordered to move to the eastern Mediterranean.
The administration’s momentous decisions on the night of October 24–25, involving the possibility of a direct military clash between the two superpowers, were made by Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and other nonelected officials of the U.S. government. The president, emotionally consumed by the Watergate investigations, was indisposed or sleeping, and the office of vice president, in the interregnum between Spiro Agnew’s resignation and Gerald Ford’s confirmation by the Senate, was vacant. (Kissinger asked General Alexander Haig at 9:50 P.M. whether the President should have been awakened. The answer was negative: “Haig thought the President too distraught. … From my own conversation with Nixon earlier in the evening, I was convinced Haig was right.”)31
Kissinger, functioning also in his capacity as presidential assistant for national security affairs, convened the WSAG to deliberate with him and Schlesinger in the White House Situation Room between 10:40 P.M. and 2 A.M. and to provide top-level unanimity for decisions taken in the president’s name. The attendees included the director of the CIA William Colby; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer; presidential chief of staff Alexander Haig; deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs Brent Scowcroft; and Kissinger’s military assistant at the NSC, Commander John T. Howe. But for the absence of the president and vice president, the group comprised the full statutory membership of the NSC. In chairing this crisis management group and making the key force-deployment and diplomatic decisions, Kissinger was in effect acting president. “It was a daunting responsibility to assume,” he recalls.32
President Nixon’s message to Brezhnev (which Nixon himself did not see until after it was sent) expressed some openness to the idea of having some American and Soviet noncombat personnel go into the area as part of an augmented UN observation team, but it categorically rejected “your proposal for a particular kind of action, that of sending Soviet and American military contingents to Egypt.” It is clear, said the presidential reply, “that the forces necessary to impose the cease-fire terms on the two sides would be massive and would require the closest coordination so as to avoid bloodshed. This is not only clearly infeasible, but it is not appropriate to the situation.” Moreover, “you must know … that we could in no event accept unilateral action. … Such action would produce incalculable consequences which would be in the interest of neither of our countries and which would end all we have striven so hard to achieve.”33
In his October 25 press conference, Kissinger insisted that “we do not consider ourselves in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. We do not believe it is necessary, at this moment, to have a confrontation. In fact, we are prepared to work cooperatively [with them]. … But cooperative action precludes unilateral action, and the President decided that it was essential that we make clear our attitude toward unilateral steps.”34
CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb asked the secretary of state whether the American alert might have been prompted as much by American domestic requirements as by the diplomatic requirements of the Middle Eastern situation—implying that the Nixon administration, reeling from the Watergate affair, needed its own “missile crisis” to reestablish its prestige with the American electorate. Kissinger’s response was angry and defensive: “We are attempting to conduct the foreign policy of the United States with regard for what we owe not to the electorate but to future generations. And it is a symptom of what is happening in our country that it could even be suggested that the United States would alert its forces for domestic reasons.” He was absolutely confident, said Kissinger, that when the record was finally made available it would show that “the President had no other choice as a responsible national leader.”35
An hour after Kissinger’s press conference, the Soviet Union joined the United States and the other members of the Security Council in voting affirmatively for Resolution 340, demanding an immediate and complete cease-fire and a return to the positions occupied by the belligerents prior to the recent round of violations, and setting up a UN emergency force composed of nonpermanent members of the Security Council (thus excluding the USSR and the United States) to oversee the cease-fire.36 The guns fell silent on the Middle Eastern battlefields, and an intricate set of negotiations commenced to separate the forces, return prisoners of war, establish enforceable truce zones, and begin the long process toward an agreed-upon settlement of the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict.
Historians will long debate whether Kissinger played his cards with consummate skill or whether he (and the world) were miraculously lucky to have avoided World War III. Kissinger did, however, establish convincingly that he was neither pro-Israeli nor pro-Arab but genuinely of the conviction that vital U.S. interests required a durable Middle Eastern peace and that this had to be based on specific political arrangements acceptable to all parties plus a local military equilibrium. This now-secured reputation served him well in the activist-mediator role that became the essence of his subsequent Middle East diplomacy.
KISSINGER’S NEW MIDDLE EAST DIPLOMACY
The brink of war, like the hangman’s noose, concentrates the statesman’s mind. Out of his practical experience in terminating the 1973 war, more than out of his realpolitik concepts, Kissinger finally put together a sophisticated Middle East policy for the United States that corresponded more closely to the complexity and volatility of the area than the administration’s diplomacy following the Jordan crisis.
The code term for Kissinger’s new Middle East diplomacy became “step by step”—a reference to Kissinger’s method of (1) getting Egypt and Israel to disengage their forces in January 1974 from the dangerous overlapping dispositions in which they were left at the cease-fire the previous October; (2) getting Syria and Israel to reestablish a narrow demilitarized buffer zone between them in May 1974; and (3) getting Egypt and Israel to agree in September 1975 to the so-called Sinai II disengagement, which provided for the first substantial relinquishment by Israel of part of the territory it had conquered in the 1967 war (a thick demilitarized buffer zone comprising most of the relinquished territory, now to be policed by the United Nations and a special observer team of U.S. civilians) and some limited Egyptian indicators of Israel’s legitimacy, such as the allowance of nonmilitary cargoes bound for Israel to pass through the Suez Canal.
The step-by-step method separated tangible specific issues, on which there were incentives to achieve immediate agreement, from the larger issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which still generated high emotion on both sides. Rather than being asked to agree on a comprehensive set of principles for the settlement at the end of the road as the basis for the immediate specific negotiations, the parties would be induced to start down the road without an agreed-upon picture of their destination any more specific than the highly ambiguous UN Resolution 242. The process of working out an agreement, even on relatively minor matters, would have a salutary effect on the negotiating climate farther down the road. At every step, vested interests would be built up on each side who would not want to see the disintegration of what had already been achieved and therefore would act as a voice of moderation, possibly a peace lobby, for that side.
The step-by-step approach, however, could not be sustained for long if either side began to regard it as a ruse to prevent the attainment of highly valued objectives. This, indeed, soon emerged as a large problem for Sadat, who had to defend himself against militants in his own country and throughout the Arab world—especially against the Palestinians, who charged that he was selling out the goal of regaining the lost Arab territories in order to buy peace with Israel and the goodwill of the United States. As time went on, therefore, Kissinger was compelled to increase his pressure on the Israelis to make sufficiently meaningful concessions for Sadat to be able to demonstrate to his militant critics that substantial and rapid progress was being made toward the main Arab goal.
Another feature of the matured Kissinger diplomacy was to treat the Arab world not as “the other side” in the Arab-Israeli conflict but as a highly differentiated set of countries with which it was more productive to deal bilaterally on most issues, including relations with Israel. Even categorizing them into moderates and militants was too neat; and acting as if such a division were valid might mean neglecting opportunities for the United States to build special lines of influence with each of the countries. Thus, Syria and Iraq, the leaders of the so-called militants, had their own historical enmities and divergent attitudes toward the Christian-Muslim conflict in Lebanon; and Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, leaders of the so-called moderates, had played vastly different parts in the Cold War, with Egypt becoming a Soviet client and maintaining a professedly “progressive” regime while the Jordanian and Saudi monarchies built their armed forces around American-supplied equipment. Then again, Saudi Arabia, which along with Iran was a dominant force in the oil producer cartel, was in a different class from Egypt and Jordan when it came to bargaining with the United States and other industrialized countries. Moreover, each of these countries had its own problems with displaced Palestinians and a different set of preferences and priorities when it came to the demands of the various Palestinian guerrilla organizations against Israel.
Of course, if U.S. bilateral diplomacy were conducted crudely, the various Arab countries might see it as a divide-and-rule policy designed to advance Israeli interests and might join to present a united front even if such unity would contradict important national interests. Even the subtle Kissinger found it impossible to sustain the bilateral approach, which involved frequent “shuttling” between the principal Middle Eastern capitals, without creating suspicion that he was playing off one country against another. To mollify such suspicions, especially near the end of his tenure, he began to weave a tangle of complicated reassurances, often in the form of promises of special economic and military-supply relationships, not all of which were likely to be backed up by Congress and some of which required him to make compensatory promises to Israel.
A corollary to the strategy of building multiple relationships in the Middle East was a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward the Soviet role in the region that Kissinger had shown when he promised to “expel” the Soviets from Egypt. If it was now deemed counterproductive to polarize the Arabs into moderate and militant camps, it was even more disadvantageous from a global geopolitical perspective to overlay this with pro-Soviet and pro-U.S. groupings. This simply would give the Russians too many automatic clients. It should not be because of U.S. policy that countries ran to the arms of the Soviet Union or were reluctant to come to the United States to satisfy needs that were not adequately attended to by the Russians. The evolution of Sadat’s policy should serve as a model: let events run their natural course and Arab nationalism would assert itself against Soviet imperialism. The process might not take this course, however, if the United States acted as if it were illegitimate for Middle Eastern countries to have “peace and friendship” treaties or client-patron relationships with the USSR, or as if in order to build a relationship with the United States one must renounce relations with Moscow; for such an uncompromising U.S. policy would itself cut against the grain of local nationalism and pride and might only further alienate some of these countries from the United States.
The more permissive U.S. attitude toward a Soviet Middle Eastern presence, however, might have its own pitfalls, particularly where the easiest way for the Russians to get a local foothold was through supplying military equipment. Increased flows of Soviet arms into the area might produce adverse shifts in the local power balance that the United States might need to counter by further military buildups of Israel or other primary U.S. clients. Thus, what started out as a relaxed approach might result in a new spiral of competitive arming of military clients and even a rigid repolarization of the area.
In short, the new Kissinger strategy of defusing immediately combustible situations and weaving a web of positive relations with virtually all states in the region (regardless of their attitudes toward Israel) might not be sufficient to (1) prevent the expansion of Soviet imperialism in the Middle East, (2) reduce the prospects of a war between the superpowers starting in the region, and (3) ensure the continued survival of Israel. Moreover, the strategy could boomerang, resulting in another Arab-Israeli war with higher levels of armaments on both sides and with the Soviets more ensconced in the area than ever; and unless in the interim the industrial world substantially reversed its growing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan might be severely divided among themselves and troubled by internal political dissention over the costs and risks of coming to Israel’s assistance during its period of maximum peril.
Kissinger must have known, on the basis of his past historical studies and his baptism in the fire of Middle Eastern politics, that symptomatic firefighting and step-by-step conflict-resolution techniques were only surface ameliorants. If any region in the world required a “structure of peace” to prevent events there from severely undermining U.S. external security and internal stability, it was the Middle East. Kissinger had reestablished American competence in the area, but something more was required. Perhaps he had a grand design, some architecture, a “vision”; but this remained unarticulated and could not be inferred from his behavior.