The Superpowers and an Arab-Israeli Political Settlement: The Cold War Years
From about 1950 until the end of the cold war in the late 1980s the Arab-Israeli conflict became entangled in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The prevalent view in the United States was that the Soviet Union sought to exploit the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to drive the West from the Middle East and secure its own domination over the area. From this perspective, Soviet ambitions were antithetical to the prospects for a settlement of the conflict that would protect the legitimate security interests of Israel, America's principal regional ally. For these reasons the United States ignored various Soviet proposals for mutual superpower disengagement from the Middle East and sought to exclude the Soviet Union from diplomatic efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. In some ways American policy succeeded: the Soviets became increasingly less influential in the Middle East from the early 1970s onward, and the United States was able to unilaterally mediate partial Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements in the mid-1970s and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979. However, the price of this success was high. The argument of this article is that American policy was based on misperceptions about Soviet interests, objectives, and behavior in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result of these misperceptions the cold war was exacerbated, there were several near-confrontations between the superpowers, and most importantly opportunities to reach a comprehensive settlement of the ArabIsraeli conflict were squandered.