|Nixon's Handling of the Yom Kippur War|

Nixon's Handling of the Yom Kippur War.

The U.S. approach to the Middle East Conflict went from near disinterest to enormous engagement from 1970 to 1973. In 1970 a war of attrition used up the parties on the Israeli-Egyptian front. Egypt, backed by the Soviet Union, tried to get the Suez Canal under its control, a plan Israel and the U.S. got to know of quite late. When Israel, on the other hand, finally bombed Egyptian forces in January, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin issued a warning to Nixon, saying the Soviet Union would not accept the Israelis destroying the Egyptian Air Force. Nixon proposed to limit arms supplies, but actually did not intervene when Israel carried its attacks forward. So the Soviet Union supplied new arms to Egypt, and instead of responding or turning again to this conflict, the U.S. simply did nothing. Kissinger said in retrospect that it would have been best to respond by increasing arms supply to Israel. In doing nothing it seemed as if the U.S. and Israel backed down. This conflict, however, resulted in the Black September, when Palestine Groups supported by Syria were beaten by Jordan, and had to recover from a devastating loss. This crisis almost brought about a greater one, as Soviets and Americans were both engaged strongly, but Jordan finally won without Israel having to intervene and the USA via their ally.

After the crisis in Jordan had been temporarily solved, the U.S. considered the conflict at a point, where no emerging crisis was supposed to unfold in the near future. So Nixon decided to concentrate on Vietnam and China again and come back to the Middle East when those problems had been brought towards some kind of solution. But this tactic proved to be wrong. After Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death, his successor Anwar el-Sadat signaled to Nixon that he was willing to turn away from the Soviets, his only arms supplier. The Soviet Union also stationed 15.000 military advisers in the country, who Sadat finally made to leave in 1971. But the Nixon administration did not get the signals Sadat sent, and – even more seriously – did not recognize that Egypt and Syria prepared for a large scale war against Israel. The Yom Kippur War began on October 6^th, 1973 with Israel and the USA realizing only hours in advance. It was a surprise attack, Israel had to suffer badly from. It took the country days to recover and finally win. As the Soviet Union had been informed by Egypt and Syria, and did not pass the information to the United States, the Yom Kippur War was another test for détente that failed.

Israeli arms had been destroyed in the attacks, and the country requested an arms supply by the Americans. Instead of delivering immediately, Kissinger managed to hold the supply for a few days, blaming Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. As the Soviet Union, in the eyes of Nixon and Kissinger, had not proven a dependable partner in the Middle East, the USA attempted to decrease Soviet influence in the region. In order to do so, the USA had to be accepted by all parties. In delaying the arms supply to Israel, Kissinger wanted to signal to Egypt and Syria that the U.S. was not interested in humiliating the Arabs. He wrote in “Years of Upheaval”, he had thought Israel would get out a little bloodied, but still win the war. Finally, Israel did even run out of munitions – but still it won.

Israel refused to stop fighting until it had surrounded the Egyptian Third Army. Sadat, eager to end the war, shot SCUD missiles on Israeli positions. A week earlier, as Thornton writes, a Soviet ship had been discovered carrying nuclear material, probably for SCUD missiles. When attacked by Egyptian missiles, Israel put its nuclear weapons on alert. To warn all actors and subvert a further escalation, the U.S. again (as earlier when facing Sino-Soviet tensions), placed an alert on their nuclear weapons, the highest this time, DEFCON III.

The Arabs had brought Israel on the edge of losing a war, which they didn’t get to manage before. And Israel lost the illusion of being invincible and stronger than the Arab countries surrounding them. In the Shuttle Diplomacy, which Kissinger started after the war, he managed to be accepted as a broker by the Arabs as well as the Israelis and to draw back Soviet influence.