《失去的和平:大国政治与阿以争端,1967-1979》作者:盖伦·杰克逊

IF 0.7 2区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY Journal of Cold War Studies Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI:10.1162/jcws_r_01165
William B. Quandt
{"title":"《失去的和平:大国政治与阿以争端,1967-1979》作者:盖伦·杰克逊","authors":"William B. Quandt","doi":"10.1162/jcws_r_01165","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The vast majority of Americans alive today who have no first-hand memories of the years 1965 to 1980 may nonetheless have some awareness of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam, the opening to China in 1971–1972, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the related Arab oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages by the virulently anti-American leaders of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Those with a bit more interest in international affairs might also be aware of the easing of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in the détente of the early 1970s, a policy that was nearly discredited by the end of the decade. This latter puzzle is the topic of Galen Jackson's deeply researched book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979.For scholars of this period, the challenge is not the lack of availability of original source material. In fact, a goldmine of formerly classified documents have been released, particularly from U.S. archives, including the tape-recorded conversations of President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Taping may have ended with Nixon's departure, but by now most of the records from the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC), and even many from key intelligence agencies, have been released, and scores of the participants in policymaking have written memoirs, published their diaries, and given extensive interviews. The sources are rich not only from U.S. archives but also, increasingly, from Israel and the former Soviet Union, along with a few accounts from seemingly reliable Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, and other Arab sources. In short, researchers have been nearly overwhelmed with the immense abundance of sources.The challenge for scholars has been to master this huge amount of material while finding a distinctive angle to develop. Jackson has done this well in a relatively short but thoroughly footnoted book, the major thesis of which is that the policy of détente espoused by Nixon in the early 1970s fell victim to a stubborn U.S. Cold War mindset, particularly but not exclusively represented by Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's disinclination to work with the Soviet Union for an overall Arab-Israeli peace was aggravated by well-known features of the U.S. political system, such as the electoral cycle, the influence of pressure groups, and the role of Congress. In Jackson's view, the result was the Carter administration's abandonment of its initial search for a comprehensive peace and its shift to brokering an Egyptian-Israeli agreement as the more realistic, but less consequential, alternative. Jackson claims that the U.S. government's desire to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East, or at least to weaken Moscow's influence there, was more important than Soviet rigidity and unwillingness to cooperate with the United States in dooming the chances for a comprehensive Middle East peace in the 1970s. The result has been a series of wars and crises, in Lebanon, between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as in Iraq and elsewhere. The implication, although not fully developed as a conclusion, is that much of this might have been avoided if a cooperative approach with the Soviet Union toward Arab-Israeli peacemaking had been sustained through the 1970s.In both my academic and my policy-advising roles—I served on the NSC staff working on the Middle East from 1972 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1979—I have also argued that the United States should have tried harder to broaden the so-called peace process beyond the Israeli-Egyptian front. Jackson is certainly correct when he calls attention to the importance of the Cold War lens through which Middle East developments were often seen, as well as the impact of domestic politics. But several other points also deserve to be included in a comprehensive study of this period.Jackson correctly starts his account with the June 1967 war. It was indeed an unanticipated yet pivotal development, and it caused many U.S. policymakers to conclude that Israel's overwhelming military victory ensured a degree of stability during which the Arab parties to the conflict would conclude that they would have to negotiate with Israel, perhaps through U.S. diplomatic channels, to recover their lost territories. United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, passed with U.S. and Soviet support in November 1967, set out the envisaged “land for peace” exchange.Nixon's predecessor, Johnson, was much less interested in foreign policy than Nixon was, and he was not so much affected by a Cold War mindset in his approach to the Middle East. Instead, Johnson was trying to grapple with the escalating war in Vietnam, which was absorbing much of his time and draining U.S. resources. He was too preoccupied to deal with another crisis in the Middle East. On the third day of the Six-Day war, when Israel was well on its way to victory and most of Johnson's advisers were both relieved and delighted, Johnson said at a meeting of the NSC that “he was not sure we were out of our troubles.” He could not visualize the USSR saying it had miscalculated, and then walking away. Our objective should be to “develop as few heroes and as few heels as we can.” It is important for everybody to know we are not for aggression. We are sorry this has taken place. We are in as good a position as we could be given the complexities of the situation. We thought we had a commitment from those governments, but it went up in smoke very quickly. The President said that by the time we get through with all the festering problems we are going to wish the war had not happened. [“Memorandum for the Record,” 7 June 1967, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1967, Vol. XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, pp. 347–348, emphasis added.]Compared to Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger seemed more clearly wedded to a Cold-War view of the world. But it is worth noting that Nixon, as a private citizen in June 1967, had sent a telegram to Johnson urging him not to tilt too far in Israel's direction for fear of alienating the Arab world. Once Nixon became president in 1969, he emphasized that U.S. policy toward the Middle East would be run from the State Department, much to Kissinger's annoyance. During the diplomacy in 1969–1970 led by Secretary of State William Rogers, U.S. officials sought to work out a common U.S.-Soviet approach to peacemaking and produced the so-called Rogers Plan, which was initially meant to be a joint U.S.-Soviet proposal until Moscow backed away when the Egyptians refused to accept it.Kissinger's role in policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict grew after the Jordan crisis of 1970. As he gained ever greater influence, he made clear that he did not favor any diplomatic initiative toward Egypt until President Anwar al-Sadat reduced the significant Soviet military presence in Egypt. When Sadat finally did precisely that in mid-1972, Kissinger was puzzled. Was this a sign of Sadat's desperation? Why had he not asked in advance for a quid pro quo from the United States? Sadat did offer to open a backchannel to Kissinger and Nixon, excluding the State Department, which Kissinger used first to play for time because 1972 was an election year and Nixon was involved in complex diplomacy concerning Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, all aimed at helping his reelection campaign.My reading of Kissinger in this period is that he did not perceive any urgency in starting Arab-Israeli diplomacy. He assumed that the Arabs had no military option; that the oil weapon was a bluff; and that Israel, if war broke out, would win as decisively as it had in 1967. In all of this he was wrong. Interestingly, Nixon was much more alarmed about a resumption of hostilities in the Middle East and was much more attracted to the idea of cooperating with Moscow to bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end.Once war broke out on 6 October 1973, Kissinger was not only national security adviser but also secretary of state (the only person who has ever served in the two positions simultaneously). The crisis was thus his to manage. Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal, which got even worse during the three weeks of the war. Kissinger, to his credit, did immediately open channels of communication to Moscow, Cairo, and, of course, Israel. He assumed that the Israelis would quickly gain the upper hand, which turned out to be true on the Syrian front but not in Sinai. Initially, both superpowers went to some lengths to show restraint. Just as the Soviet Union began to send military supplies by air to Egypt and Syria, Kissinger tried to work out a formula for a ceasefire in place, which would have left Israeli forces somewhat beyond the prewar lines on the Syrian front but well back from the Suez Canal on the Egyptian front. In a still under-analyzed initiative, Kissinger tried to persuade Soviet leaders to convince Sadat to accept a ceasefire in place, promising that he would seek to get the Israelis to agree. How he managed to persuade the Israelis to go along, is still not clear. The problem was that the Soviet Union could not deliver Sadat, who apparently wanted the war to drag on and was awaiting the Saudi announcement of the oil embargo.By 13 October, after the failure of the ceasefire initiative became clear, Kissinger's strategy shifted. A large-scale airlift of arms to Israel began, and within days the Israelis began a rapid advance on the Egyptian front. Kissinger deflected calls from the Soviet Union for him to resume talks on how to end the war. Meanwhile, Nixon's domestic position was crumbling because of Watergate, and Kissinger seemed to be genuinely worried that the president's political woes would signal U.S. weakness, with possibly dire consequences. This was the mindset that accounts for his slow-walking the diplomacy with Moscow, his hint to the Israelis that they could violate the eventual ceasefire agreement of 22 October without serious repercussions from Washington, and his “deliberate overreaction” of declaring a DEFCON-3 military alert when Soviet leaders clumsily made a veiled threat to intervene militarily if the Israelis pushed further with their offensive against the Egyptian Third Army. Jackson is certainly correct that an element of the Cold War mindset is on display here, but there was more than that as well. He is also correct that the beginning of the U.S. public's turning away from the idea of détente with the Soviet Union was in no small measure attributable to the so-called “nuclear alert.”During Jimmy Carter's presidency, the challenges were different. Carter and his key foreign-policy advisers—namely, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski—initially favored a so-called comprehensive approach to dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carter even referred to the possibility of a “Palestinian homeland” within the first few months of his presidency. Although Brzezinski shared with Kissinger a strong aversion to close cooperation with the Soviet Union, this was not so much the case with Carter and Vance. But one of the achievements of Kissinger's diplomacy was that the United States had quite good direct channels to all the major Arab players except for the Palestinians. Although U.S. officials did consult with their Soviet counterparts, most of the diplomacy was being conducted directly with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom had met directly with Carter by mid-1977.Carter's plan for a joint U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored multilateral Arab-Israeli negotiation at Geneva by the end of 1977 was thrown off track primarily by the unexpected election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel in the middle of the year. U.S. officials needed a bit of time to sort out which parts of Begin's hardline rhetoric deserved to be taken most seriously, but by the fall it was becoming clear that the original plan for convening a peace conference in Geneva was in serious trouble. The critical reaction in U.S. public opinion to the U.S.-Soviet statement of 1 October 1977 calling for a reconvening of the Geneva conference was a blow to Carter. Sadat's subsequent surprise offer to go to Jerusalem reshuffled the deck, opening the possibility of a fast track to an Egyptian-Israeli agreement that might serve as a model for later negotiations on other fronts. By early 1978, Carter had concluded that he needed to go forward quickly with the Egyptian-Israeli talks, and he had also determined that Sadat did not need much on the Palestinian front as political cover for what was likely to be perceived as a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace.We will never know what Carter might have done on Arab-Israeli issues if he had won a second term or if the Iranian revolution had not occurred. But it was not a Cold War mindset that led him away from seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace. Instead, this shift was spurred by the intricacies of Middle East politics and Begin's adamancy that he would not deal with the “Arabs of Eretz Israel” and would never abandon any part of Judea and Samaria, as he always called the West Bank. Domestic politics also inevitably played a role.Jackson is correct that the failure of U.S. diplomacy in the 1970s to move toward a comprehensive Middle East peace in cooperation with the Soviet Union was a serious blow for the policy of détente. The Reagan administration was filled with people, including some Democrats, who had rallied to Reagan as the best hope for leading the campaign against the “evil empire.” Many former Democrats, some deeply angry about the tough-minded way Carter had treated Israel, flocked to the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger. Amazingly, Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush, and especially Bush's able Secretary of State James Baker, managed to keep the possibility of U.S.-Soviet cooperation alive during and after the Iraq crisis of 1990–1991, culminating with the Madrid Conference in the fall of 1991. That last effort at a comprehensive Middle East peace was very close to what Carter had envisaged in 1977, and, if Bush had been reelected, he and his new secretary of state might have made serious headway on both the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts, especially when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in power. But it was left to Bill Clinton to pursue the elusive peace process, and by the end of his two terms the prospects for a comprehensive Middle East peace had essentially disappeared, as had the Cold War and the mentality it had spawned. The “peace process” remained in a comatose state during the period of U.S. global preponderance in the 1990s. If the current era is evolving into a new Cold War, perhaps with both Russia and China, Jackson has already warned us with this fine book about how a Cold War mindset might again interfere with sensible U.S. foreign policymaking.","PeriodicalId":45551,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cold War Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"<i>A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979</i> by Galen Jackson\",\"authors\":\"William B. Quandt\",\"doi\":\"10.1162/jcws_r_01165\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"The vast majority of Americans alive today who have no first-hand memories of the years 1965 to 1980 may nonetheless have some awareness of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam, the opening to China in 1971–1972, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the related Arab oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages by the virulently anti-American leaders of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Those with a bit more interest in international affairs might also be aware of the easing of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in the détente of the early 1970s, a policy that was nearly discredited by the end of the decade. This latter puzzle is the topic of Galen Jackson's deeply researched book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979.For scholars of this period, the challenge is not the lack of availability of original source material. In fact, a goldmine of formerly classified documents have been released, particularly from U.S. archives, including the tape-recorded conversations of President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Taping may have ended with Nixon's departure, but by now most of the records from the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC), and even many from key intelligence agencies, have been released, and scores of the participants in policymaking have written memoirs, published their diaries, and given extensive interviews. The sources are rich not only from U.S. archives but also, increasingly, from Israel and the former Soviet Union, along with a few accounts from seemingly reliable Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, and other Arab sources. In short, researchers have been nearly overwhelmed with the immense abundance of sources.The challenge for scholars has been to master this huge amount of material while finding a distinctive angle to develop. Jackson has done this well in a relatively short but thoroughly footnoted book, the major thesis of which is that the policy of détente espoused by Nixon in the early 1970s fell victim to a stubborn U.S. Cold War mindset, particularly but not exclusively represented by Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's disinclination to work with the Soviet Union for an overall Arab-Israeli peace was aggravated by well-known features of the U.S. political system, such as the electoral cycle, the influence of pressure groups, and the role of Congress. In Jackson's view, the result was the Carter administration's abandonment of its initial search for a comprehensive peace and its shift to brokering an Egyptian-Israeli agreement as the more realistic, but less consequential, alternative. Jackson claims that the U.S. government's desire to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East, or at least to weaken Moscow's influence there, was more important than Soviet rigidity and unwillingness to cooperate with the United States in dooming the chances for a comprehensive Middle East peace in the 1970s. The result has been a series of wars and crises, in Lebanon, between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as in Iraq and elsewhere. The implication, although not fully developed as a conclusion, is that much of this might have been avoided if a cooperative approach with the Soviet Union toward Arab-Israeli peacemaking had been sustained through the 1970s.In both my academic and my policy-advising roles—I served on the NSC staff working on the Middle East from 1972 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1979—I have also argued that the United States should have tried harder to broaden the so-called peace process beyond the Israeli-Egyptian front. Jackson is certainly correct when he calls attention to the importance of the Cold War lens through which Middle East developments were often seen, as well as the impact of domestic politics. But several other points also deserve to be included in a comprehensive study of this period.Jackson correctly starts his account with the June 1967 war. It was indeed an unanticipated yet pivotal development, and it caused many U.S. policymakers to conclude that Israel's overwhelming military victory ensured a degree of stability during which the Arab parties to the conflict would conclude that they would have to negotiate with Israel, perhaps through U.S. diplomatic channels, to recover their lost territories. United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, passed with U.S. and Soviet support in November 1967, set out the envisaged “land for peace” exchange.Nixon's predecessor, Johnson, was much less interested in foreign policy than Nixon was, and he was not so much affected by a Cold War mindset in his approach to the Middle East. Instead, Johnson was trying to grapple with the escalating war in Vietnam, which was absorbing much of his time and draining U.S. resources. He was too preoccupied to deal with another crisis in the Middle East. On the third day of the Six-Day war, when Israel was well on its way to victory and most of Johnson's advisers were both relieved and delighted, Johnson said at a meeting of the NSC that “he was not sure we were out of our troubles.” He could not visualize the USSR saying it had miscalculated, and then walking away. Our objective should be to “develop as few heroes and as few heels as we can.” It is important for everybody to know we are not for aggression. We are sorry this has taken place. We are in as good a position as we could be given the complexities of the situation. We thought we had a commitment from those governments, but it went up in smoke very quickly. The President said that by the time we get through with all the festering problems we are going to wish the war had not happened. [“Memorandum for the Record,” 7 June 1967, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1967, Vol. XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, pp. 347–348, emphasis added.]Compared to Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger seemed more clearly wedded to a Cold-War view of the world. But it is worth noting that Nixon, as a private citizen in June 1967, had sent a telegram to Johnson urging him not to tilt too far in Israel's direction for fear of alienating the Arab world. Once Nixon became president in 1969, he emphasized that U.S. policy toward the Middle East would be run from the State Department, much to Kissinger's annoyance. During the diplomacy in 1969–1970 led by Secretary of State William Rogers, U.S. officials sought to work out a common U.S.-Soviet approach to peacemaking and produced the so-called Rogers Plan, which was initially meant to be a joint U.S.-Soviet proposal until Moscow backed away when the Egyptians refused to accept it.Kissinger's role in policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict grew after the Jordan crisis of 1970. As he gained ever greater influence, he made clear that he did not favor any diplomatic initiative toward Egypt until President Anwar al-Sadat reduced the significant Soviet military presence in Egypt. When Sadat finally did precisely that in mid-1972, Kissinger was puzzled. Was this a sign of Sadat's desperation? Why had he not asked in advance for a quid pro quo from the United States? Sadat did offer to open a backchannel to Kissinger and Nixon, excluding the State Department, which Kissinger used first to play for time because 1972 was an election year and Nixon was involved in complex diplomacy concerning Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, all aimed at helping his reelection campaign.My reading of Kissinger in this period is that he did not perceive any urgency in starting Arab-Israeli diplomacy. He assumed that the Arabs had no military option; that the oil weapon was a bluff; and that Israel, if war broke out, would win as decisively as it had in 1967. In all of this he was wrong. Interestingly, Nixon was much more alarmed about a resumption of hostilities in the Middle East and was much more attracted to the idea of cooperating with Moscow to bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end.Once war broke out on 6 October 1973, Kissinger was not only national security adviser but also secretary of state (the only person who has ever served in the two positions simultaneously). The crisis was thus his to manage. Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal, which got even worse during the three weeks of the war. Kissinger, to his credit, did immediately open channels of communication to Moscow, Cairo, and, of course, Israel. He assumed that the Israelis would quickly gain the upper hand, which turned out to be true on the Syrian front but not in Sinai. Initially, both superpowers went to some lengths to show restraint. Just as the Soviet Union began to send military supplies by air to Egypt and Syria, Kissinger tried to work out a formula for a ceasefire in place, which would have left Israeli forces somewhat beyond the prewar lines on the Syrian front but well back from the Suez Canal on the Egyptian front. In a still under-analyzed initiative, Kissinger tried to persuade Soviet leaders to convince Sadat to accept a ceasefire in place, promising that he would seek to get the Israelis to agree. How he managed to persuade the Israelis to go along, is still not clear. The problem was that the Soviet Union could not deliver Sadat, who apparently wanted the war to drag on and was awaiting the Saudi announcement of the oil embargo.By 13 October, after the failure of the ceasefire initiative became clear, Kissinger's strategy shifted. A large-scale airlift of arms to Israel began, and within days the Israelis began a rapid advance on the Egyptian front. Kissinger deflected calls from the Soviet Union for him to resume talks on how to end the war. Meanwhile, Nixon's domestic position was crumbling because of Watergate, and Kissinger seemed to be genuinely worried that the president's political woes would signal U.S. weakness, with possibly dire consequences. This was the mindset that accounts for his slow-walking the diplomacy with Moscow, his hint to the Israelis that they could violate the eventual ceasefire agreement of 22 October without serious repercussions from Washington, and his “deliberate overreaction” of declaring a DEFCON-3 military alert when Soviet leaders clumsily made a veiled threat to intervene militarily if the Israelis pushed further with their offensive against the Egyptian Third Army. Jackson is certainly correct that an element of the Cold War mindset is on display here, but there was more than that as well. He is also correct that the beginning of the U.S. public's turning away from the idea of détente with the Soviet Union was in no small measure attributable to the so-called “nuclear alert.”During Jimmy Carter's presidency, the challenges were different. Carter and his key foreign-policy advisers—namely, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski—initially favored a so-called comprehensive approach to dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carter even referred to the possibility of a “Palestinian homeland” within the first few months of his presidency. Although Brzezinski shared with Kissinger a strong aversion to close cooperation with the Soviet Union, this was not so much the case with Carter and Vance. But one of the achievements of Kissinger's diplomacy was that the United States had quite good direct channels to all the major Arab players except for the Palestinians. Although U.S. officials did consult with their Soviet counterparts, most of the diplomacy was being conducted directly with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom had met directly with Carter by mid-1977.Carter's plan for a joint U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored multilateral Arab-Israeli negotiation at Geneva by the end of 1977 was thrown off track primarily by the unexpected election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel in the middle of the year. U.S. officials needed a bit of time to sort out which parts of Begin's hardline rhetoric deserved to be taken most seriously, but by the fall it was becoming clear that the original plan for convening a peace conference in Geneva was in serious trouble. The critical reaction in U.S. public opinion to the U.S.-Soviet statement of 1 October 1977 calling for a reconvening of the Geneva conference was a blow to Carter. Sadat's subsequent surprise offer to go to Jerusalem reshuffled the deck, opening the possibility of a fast track to an Egyptian-Israeli agreement that might serve as a model for later negotiations on other fronts. By early 1978, Carter had concluded that he needed to go forward quickly with the Egyptian-Israeli talks, and he had also determined that Sadat did not need much on the Palestinian front as political cover for what was likely to be perceived as a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace.We will never know what Carter might have done on Arab-Israeli issues if he had won a second term or if the Iranian revolution had not occurred. But it was not a Cold War mindset that led him away from seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace. Instead, this shift was spurred by the intricacies of Middle East politics and Begin's adamancy that he would not deal with the “Arabs of Eretz Israel” and would never abandon any part of Judea and Samaria, as he always called the West Bank. Domestic politics also inevitably played a role.Jackson is correct that the failure of U.S. diplomacy in the 1970s to move toward a comprehensive Middle East peace in cooperation with the Soviet Union was a serious blow for the policy of détente. The Reagan administration was filled with people, including some Democrats, who had rallied to Reagan as the best hope for leading the campaign against the “evil empire.” Many former Democrats, some deeply angry about the tough-minded way Carter had treated Israel, flocked to the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger. Amazingly, Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush, and especially Bush's able Secretary of State James Baker, managed to keep the possibility of U.S.-Soviet cooperation alive during and after the Iraq crisis of 1990–1991, culminating with the Madrid Conference in the fall of 1991. That last effort at a comprehensive Middle East peace was very close to what Carter had envisaged in 1977, and, if Bush had been reelected, he and his new secretary of state might have made serious headway on both the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts, especially when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in power. But it was left to Bill Clinton to pursue the elusive peace process, and by the end of his two terms the prospects for a comprehensive Middle East peace had essentially disappeared, as had the Cold War and the mentality it had spawned. The “peace process” remained in a comatose state during the period of U.S. global preponderance in the 1990s. If the current era is evolving into a new Cold War, perhaps with both Russia and China, Jackson has already warned us with this fine book about how a Cold War mindset might again interfere with sensible U.S. foreign policymaking.\",\"PeriodicalId\":45551,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Journal of Cold War Studies\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.7000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-01-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Journal of Cold War Studies\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01165\",\"RegionNum\":2,\"RegionCategory\":\"历史学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"HISTORY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Cold War Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_r_01165","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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今天,绝大多数对1965年至1980年没有第一手记忆的美国人,可能对美国在越南的惨败、1971年至1972年对中国的开放、1973年10月的阿以战争和相关的阿拉伯石油禁运、水门事件和1974年理查德·尼克松总统的辞职、1979年的伊朗革命、以及随后美国外交官被新成立的伊朗伊斯兰共和国恶毒的反美领导人劫持为人质。那些对国际事务更感兴趣的人可能也知道,在20世纪70年代初,美苏冷战对抗的缓和,这一政策在20世纪70年代末几乎失去了信誉。后一种困惑是盖伦·杰克逊深入研究的著作《失去的和平:大国政治与阿以争端,1967-1979》的主题。对于这一时期的学者来说,挑战并不在于缺乏原始资料。事实上,以前的机密文件的金矿已经被释放,特别是来自美国档案馆的文件,包括林登·约翰逊总统和他的继任者理查德·尼克松的谈话录音。窃听可能随着尼克松的离开而结束,但到目前为止,美国国务院和国家安全委员会(NSC)的大部分记录,甚至许多来自关键情报机构的记录都已被公布,许多参与决策的人已经写了回忆录,出版了日记,并接受了广泛的采访。资料来源丰富,不仅来自美国档案,而且越来越多地来自以色列和前苏联,以及一些看似可靠的埃及、叙利亚、巴勒斯坦和其他阿拉伯来源。简而言之,研究人员几乎被海量的资源所淹没。学者们面临的挑战是,既要掌握大量的材料,又要找到一个独特的发展角度。在这本篇幅相对较短但脚注完备的书中,杰克逊做得很好。书中的主要论点是,尼克松在20世纪70年代初所支持的“dametente”政策成为了美国顽固的冷战思维的牺牲品,尤其是在1973年阿以战争期间,亨利·基辛格(Henry Kissinger)代表了这种思维,但并非唯一。基辛格不愿意与苏联合作实现全面的阿以和平,而众所周知的美国政治制度的特点,如选举周期、压力集团的影响和国会的作用,加剧了基辛格的这种不情愿。在杰克逊看来,结果是卡特政府放弃了最初寻求全面和平的努力,转而斡旋埃及和以色列达成协议,这是一个更现实、但影响较小的选择。杰克逊声称,在20世纪70年代,美国政府希望将苏联“驱逐”出中东,或者至少削弱莫斯科在中东的影响力,这比苏联的僵化和不愿与美国合作更重要,因为苏联不愿与美国合作,导致中东全面和平的机会破灭。其结果是一系列的战争和危机,在黎巴嫩,在以色列和巴勒斯坦之间,在伊拉克和其他地方。其含义虽然没有完全发展成结论,但如果在整个1970年代同苏联就阿拉伯-以色列建立和平问题采取合作办法,大部分情况是可以避免的。我曾在1972年至1974年和1977年至1979年在国家安全委员会工作,负责中东问题。在我的学术和政策咨询工作中,我也曾主张美国应该更加努力地扩大所谓的和平进程,使之超越以色列和埃及的战线。当杰克逊呼吁人们注意冷战镜头的重要性时,他当然是正确的,因为冷战镜头经常看到中东的发展,以及国内政治的影响。但是,在对这一时期进行全面研究时,还有其他几点也值得考虑。杰克逊正确地从1967年6月的战争开始。这确实是一个出乎意料的关键发展,它使许多美国决策者得出结论,以色列压倒性的军事胜利确保了一定程度的稳定,在此期间,冲突的阿拉伯各方将得出结论,他们必须与以色列谈判,也许是通过美国的外交渠道,以收复他们失去的领土。在美国和苏联的支持下,联合国安理会于1967年11月通过了第242号决议,提出了设想中的“土地换和平”交换。尼克松的前任约翰逊对外交政策的兴趣远不如尼克松,他在中东问题上也没有受到冷战思维的太大影响。相反,约翰逊正努力应对不断升级的越南战争,这场战争占用了他的大部分时间,耗尽了美国的资源。他全神贯注于处理中东的另一场危机。 在“六日战争”的第三天,当以色列即将取得胜利,约翰逊的大多数顾问都松了一口气,感到高兴时,约翰逊在国家安全委员会的一次会议上说,“他不确定我们是否已经摆脱了麻烦。”他无法想象苏联会说自己计算错误,然后走开。我们的目标应该是“尽可能少地培养英雄和跟班”。让每个人都知道我们不支持侵略,这很重要。我们很抱歉发生了这样的事。考虑到局势的复杂性,我们处于尽可能有利的位置。我们原以为我们得到了这些政府的承诺,但很快就灰飞烟灭了。总统说,等我们解决了所有这些恶化的问题,我们会希望战争没有发生。[“记录备忘录”,1967年6月7日,美国国务院,《美国外交关系》,1967年,第19卷,阿以危机和战争,第347-348页,加了重点。与约翰逊相比,尼克松和基辛格似乎更明显地固守冷战的世界观。但值得注意的是,1967年6月,尼克松以普通公民的身份给约翰逊发了一封电报,敦促他不要向以色列的方向倾斜太多,以免疏远阿拉伯世界。1969年尼克松当选总统后,他强调美国的中东政策将由国务院执行,这让基辛格非常恼火。在1969年至1970年国务卿威廉·罗杰斯(William Rogers)领导的外交活动中,美国官员试图制定出一种美苏共同的和平方式,并提出了所谓的罗杰斯计划(Rogers Plan),该计划最初是由美苏联合提出的,但由于埃及拒绝接受,莫斯科放弃了该计划。1970年约旦危机后,基辛格在阿拉伯-以色列冲突政策中的作用越来越大。随着他的影响力越来越大,他明确表示,除非安瓦尔·萨达特(Anwar al-Sadat)总统减少苏联在埃及的重要军事存在,否则他不赞成对埃及采取任何外交行动。当萨达特最终在1972年年中这么做时,基辛格感到困惑。这是萨达特绝望的迹象吗?他为什么没有事先要求美国提供交换条件呢?萨达特确实提出向基辛格和尼克松打开一个秘密渠道,但不包括国务院。基辛格首先利用国务院来拖延时间,因为1972年是选举年,尼克松卷入了涉及越南、中国和苏联的复杂外交,所有这些都是为了帮助他的连任竞选。我对这一时期基辛格的解读是,他没有意识到启动阿以外交的紧迫性。他认为阿拉伯人没有军事选择;石油武器只是虚张声势;如果战争爆发,以色列将像1967年那样取得决定性的胜利。在这一切上,他都错了。有趣的是,尼克松更担心中东地区的敌对状态会重新爆发,他更倾向于与莫斯科合作,结束阿以冲突。1973年10月6日战争爆发后,基辛格不仅是国家安全顾问,还是国务卿(他是唯一一位同时担任这两个职位的人)。因此,危机是由他来处理的。尼克松深陷水门事件的泥潭,在战争的三个星期里,水门事件变得更加严重。值得赞扬的是,基辛格确实立即开通了与莫斯科、开罗,当然还有以色列的沟通渠道。他以为以色列会很快占上风,结果在叙利亚前线是这样,但在西奈半岛却不是这样。最初,两个超级大国都竭力表现出克制。就在苏联开始用飞机向埃及和叙利亚运送军事物资时,基辛格试图制定一个停火方案,使以色列军队在叙利亚前线稍微超出战前的战线,而在埃及前线则远离苏伊士运河。在一项尚未得到充分分析的倡议中,基辛格试图说服苏联领导人说服萨达特接受就地停火,并承诺他会设法让以色列人同意。他是如何说服以色列同意的,目前还不清楚。问题是苏联无法交出萨达特,后者显然希望战争拖延下去,并在等待沙特宣布石油禁运。到10月13日,在停火倡议的失败变得明显之后,基辛格的策略发生了变化。向以色列大规模空运武器的行动开始了,几天之内,以色列人开始在埃及前线迅速推进。基辛格回避了苏联要求他恢复关于如何结束战争的谈判的呼吁。与此同时,尼克松的国内地位因水门事件而摇摇欲坠,基辛格似乎真的担心总统的政治困境会标志着美国的软弱,可能会带来可怕的后果。 正是这种心态导致了他在与莫斯科的外交上走得很慢,他暗示以色列可以违反10月22日的最终停火协议,而不会受到华盛顿的严重影响,当苏联领导人笨拙地含蓄地威胁说,如果以色列进一步推进对埃及第三军的进攻,他将进行军事干预,他宣布了DEFCON-3军事警报,这是他“故意的过度反应”。杰克逊当然是正确的,这里展示了冷战思维的元素,但也有更多的东西。他还正确地指出,美国公众之所以开始对与苏联的关系不感兴趣,在很大程度上要归因于所谓的“核警报”。在吉米•卡特(Jimmy Carter)担任总统期间,面临的挑战有所不同。卡特和他的主要外交政策顾问——即国务卿赛勒斯·万斯和国家安全顾问兹比格涅夫·布热津斯基——最初倾向于采用所谓的全面方法来处理阿以冲突。卡特甚至在他担任总统的头几个月里提到了建立“巴勒斯坦家园”的可能性。尽管布热津斯基和基辛格一样强烈反对与苏联密切合作,但卡特和万斯却不是这样。但基辛格的外交成就之一是,美国与除了巴勒斯坦人以外的所有主要阿拉伯国家都有很好的直接渠道。尽管美国官员确实与苏联官员进行了磋商,但大多数外交活动都是直接与以色列、埃及、叙利亚、约旦和沙特阿拉伯的领导人进行的,这些领导人在1977年年中之前都与卡特进行了直接会晤。卡特计划在1977年底前在日内瓦举行由美国和苏联共同发起的阿以多边谈判,但主要由于梅纳赫姆·贝京(Menachem Begin)在年中出人意料地当选以色列总理而偏离了轨道。美国官员需要一点时间来理清贝京的强硬言论中哪些部分最值得认真对待,但到了秋天,在日内瓦召开和平会议的最初计划显然遇到了严重的麻烦。美国公众舆论对1977年10月1日美苏呼吁重新召开日内瓦会议的声明的批评反应对卡特是一个打击。萨达特随后出人意料地提出前往耶路撒冷,重新洗牌,为埃及和以色列达成协议开辟了一条快速通道的可能性,这可能成为以后在其他方面谈判的典范。到1978年初,卡特已经得出结论,他需要迅速推进埃及和以色列的谈判,他也确定萨达特不需要在巴勒斯坦方面做太多的政治掩护,以实现可能被视为单独的埃及和以色列和平。我们永远不会知道,如果卡特赢得了第二个任期,或者如果伊朗革命没有发生,他会在阿以问题上做些什么。但导致他放弃寻求中东全面和平的并非冷战思维。相反,这一转变是由错综复杂的中东政治和贝京的坚定立场推动的,他不会与“以色列土地上的阿拉伯人”打交道,永远不会放弃朱迪亚和撒玛利亚的任何部分,他一直称其为约旦河西岸。国内政治也不可避免地发挥了作用。杰克逊是正确的,美国在20世纪70年代未能与苏联合作实现全面的中东和平,这对美国的人道主义政策是一个严重的打击。里根政府里挤满了人,包括一些民主党人,他们团结在里根身边,认为里根是领导反对“邪恶帝国”运动的最大希望。许多前民主党人,有些人对卡特对待以色列的强硬态度深感愤怒,纷纷加入“当前危险委员会”的行列。令人惊讶的是,里根和后来的老布什,尤其是老布什得力的国务卿詹姆斯·贝克,在1990-1991年伊拉克危机期间和之后,设法保持了美苏合作的可能性,并在1991年秋天的马德里会议上达到高潮。最后一次中东全面和平的努力与卡特在1977年设想的非常接近,如果布什再次当选,他和他的新国务卿可能会在叙利亚和巴勒斯坦战线上取得重大进展,特别是在伊扎克·拉宾总理掌权的时候。但是,追求难以捉摸的和平进程的任务留给了比尔·克林顿(Bill Clinton),在他的两届任期结束时,中东全面和平的前景基本上消失了,冷战及其催生的心态也消失了。在20世纪90年代美国的全球优势时期,“和平进程”一直处于昏迷状态。 如果当前的时代正在演变成一场新的冷战,也许是与俄罗斯和中国的冷战,杰克逊已经在这本好书中警告我们,冷战思维可能会再次干扰美国明智的外交政策制定。
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A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979 by Galen Jackson
The vast majority of Americans alive today who have no first-hand memories of the years 1965 to 1980 may nonetheless have some awareness of the U.S. debacle in Vietnam, the opening to China in 1971–1972, the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the related Arab oil embargo, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974, the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of U.S. diplomats as hostages by the virulently anti-American leaders of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Those with a bit more interest in international affairs might also be aware of the easing of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry in the détente of the early 1970s, a policy that was nearly discredited by the end of the decade. This latter puzzle is the topic of Galen Jackson's deeply researched book, A Lost Peace: Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967–1979.For scholars of this period, the challenge is not the lack of availability of original source material. In fact, a goldmine of formerly classified documents have been released, particularly from U.S. archives, including the tape-recorded conversations of President Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Taping may have ended with Nixon's departure, but by now most of the records from the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC), and even many from key intelligence agencies, have been released, and scores of the participants in policymaking have written memoirs, published their diaries, and given extensive interviews. The sources are rich not only from U.S. archives but also, increasingly, from Israel and the former Soviet Union, along with a few accounts from seemingly reliable Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, and other Arab sources. In short, researchers have been nearly overwhelmed with the immense abundance of sources.The challenge for scholars has been to master this huge amount of material while finding a distinctive angle to develop. Jackson has done this well in a relatively short but thoroughly footnoted book, the major thesis of which is that the policy of détente espoused by Nixon in the early 1970s fell victim to a stubborn U.S. Cold War mindset, particularly but not exclusively represented by Henry Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Kissinger's disinclination to work with the Soviet Union for an overall Arab-Israeli peace was aggravated by well-known features of the U.S. political system, such as the electoral cycle, the influence of pressure groups, and the role of Congress. In Jackson's view, the result was the Carter administration's abandonment of its initial search for a comprehensive peace and its shift to brokering an Egyptian-Israeli agreement as the more realistic, but less consequential, alternative. Jackson claims that the U.S. government's desire to “expel” the Soviet Union from the Middle East, or at least to weaken Moscow's influence there, was more important than Soviet rigidity and unwillingness to cooperate with the United States in dooming the chances for a comprehensive Middle East peace in the 1970s. The result has been a series of wars and crises, in Lebanon, between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as in Iraq and elsewhere. The implication, although not fully developed as a conclusion, is that much of this might have been avoided if a cooperative approach with the Soviet Union toward Arab-Israeli peacemaking had been sustained through the 1970s.In both my academic and my policy-advising roles—I served on the NSC staff working on the Middle East from 1972 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1979—I have also argued that the United States should have tried harder to broaden the so-called peace process beyond the Israeli-Egyptian front. Jackson is certainly correct when he calls attention to the importance of the Cold War lens through which Middle East developments were often seen, as well as the impact of domestic politics. But several other points also deserve to be included in a comprehensive study of this period.Jackson correctly starts his account with the June 1967 war. It was indeed an unanticipated yet pivotal development, and it caused many U.S. policymakers to conclude that Israel's overwhelming military victory ensured a degree of stability during which the Arab parties to the conflict would conclude that they would have to negotiate with Israel, perhaps through U.S. diplomatic channels, to recover their lost territories. United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242, passed with U.S. and Soviet support in November 1967, set out the envisaged “land for peace” exchange.Nixon's predecessor, Johnson, was much less interested in foreign policy than Nixon was, and he was not so much affected by a Cold War mindset in his approach to the Middle East. Instead, Johnson was trying to grapple with the escalating war in Vietnam, which was absorbing much of his time and draining U.S. resources. He was too preoccupied to deal with another crisis in the Middle East. On the third day of the Six-Day war, when Israel was well on its way to victory and most of Johnson's advisers were both relieved and delighted, Johnson said at a meeting of the NSC that “he was not sure we were out of our troubles.” He could not visualize the USSR saying it had miscalculated, and then walking away. Our objective should be to “develop as few heroes and as few heels as we can.” It is important for everybody to know we are not for aggression. We are sorry this has taken place. We are in as good a position as we could be given the complexities of the situation. We thought we had a commitment from those governments, but it went up in smoke very quickly. The President said that by the time we get through with all the festering problems we are going to wish the war had not happened. [“Memorandum for the Record,” 7 June 1967, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1967, Vol. XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, pp. 347–348, emphasis added.]Compared to Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger seemed more clearly wedded to a Cold-War view of the world. But it is worth noting that Nixon, as a private citizen in June 1967, had sent a telegram to Johnson urging him not to tilt too far in Israel's direction for fear of alienating the Arab world. Once Nixon became president in 1969, he emphasized that U.S. policy toward the Middle East would be run from the State Department, much to Kissinger's annoyance. During the diplomacy in 1969–1970 led by Secretary of State William Rogers, U.S. officials sought to work out a common U.S.-Soviet approach to peacemaking and produced the so-called Rogers Plan, which was initially meant to be a joint U.S.-Soviet proposal until Moscow backed away when the Egyptians refused to accept it.Kissinger's role in policy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict grew after the Jordan crisis of 1970. As he gained ever greater influence, he made clear that he did not favor any diplomatic initiative toward Egypt until President Anwar al-Sadat reduced the significant Soviet military presence in Egypt. When Sadat finally did precisely that in mid-1972, Kissinger was puzzled. Was this a sign of Sadat's desperation? Why had he not asked in advance for a quid pro quo from the United States? Sadat did offer to open a backchannel to Kissinger and Nixon, excluding the State Department, which Kissinger used first to play for time because 1972 was an election year and Nixon was involved in complex diplomacy concerning Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, all aimed at helping his reelection campaign.My reading of Kissinger in this period is that he did not perceive any urgency in starting Arab-Israeli diplomacy. He assumed that the Arabs had no military option; that the oil weapon was a bluff; and that Israel, if war broke out, would win as decisively as it had in 1967. In all of this he was wrong. Interestingly, Nixon was much more alarmed about a resumption of hostilities in the Middle East and was much more attracted to the idea of cooperating with Moscow to bring the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end.Once war broke out on 6 October 1973, Kissinger was not only national security adviser but also secretary of state (the only person who has ever served in the two positions simultaneously). The crisis was thus his to manage. Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal, which got even worse during the three weeks of the war. Kissinger, to his credit, did immediately open channels of communication to Moscow, Cairo, and, of course, Israel. He assumed that the Israelis would quickly gain the upper hand, which turned out to be true on the Syrian front but not in Sinai. Initially, both superpowers went to some lengths to show restraint. Just as the Soviet Union began to send military supplies by air to Egypt and Syria, Kissinger tried to work out a formula for a ceasefire in place, which would have left Israeli forces somewhat beyond the prewar lines on the Syrian front but well back from the Suez Canal on the Egyptian front. In a still under-analyzed initiative, Kissinger tried to persuade Soviet leaders to convince Sadat to accept a ceasefire in place, promising that he would seek to get the Israelis to agree. How he managed to persuade the Israelis to go along, is still not clear. The problem was that the Soviet Union could not deliver Sadat, who apparently wanted the war to drag on and was awaiting the Saudi announcement of the oil embargo.By 13 October, after the failure of the ceasefire initiative became clear, Kissinger's strategy shifted. A large-scale airlift of arms to Israel began, and within days the Israelis began a rapid advance on the Egyptian front. Kissinger deflected calls from the Soviet Union for him to resume talks on how to end the war. Meanwhile, Nixon's domestic position was crumbling because of Watergate, and Kissinger seemed to be genuinely worried that the president's political woes would signal U.S. weakness, with possibly dire consequences. This was the mindset that accounts for his slow-walking the diplomacy with Moscow, his hint to the Israelis that they could violate the eventual ceasefire agreement of 22 October without serious repercussions from Washington, and his “deliberate overreaction” of declaring a DEFCON-3 military alert when Soviet leaders clumsily made a veiled threat to intervene militarily if the Israelis pushed further with their offensive against the Egyptian Third Army. Jackson is certainly correct that an element of the Cold War mindset is on display here, but there was more than that as well. He is also correct that the beginning of the U.S. public's turning away from the idea of détente with the Soviet Union was in no small measure attributable to the so-called “nuclear alert.”During Jimmy Carter's presidency, the challenges were different. Carter and his key foreign-policy advisers—namely, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski—initially favored a so-called comprehensive approach to dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carter even referred to the possibility of a “Palestinian homeland” within the first few months of his presidency. Although Brzezinski shared with Kissinger a strong aversion to close cooperation with the Soviet Union, this was not so much the case with Carter and Vance. But one of the achievements of Kissinger's diplomacy was that the United States had quite good direct channels to all the major Arab players except for the Palestinians. Although U.S. officials did consult with their Soviet counterparts, most of the diplomacy was being conducted directly with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom had met directly with Carter by mid-1977.Carter's plan for a joint U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored multilateral Arab-Israeli negotiation at Geneva by the end of 1977 was thrown off track primarily by the unexpected election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel in the middle of the year. U.S. officials needed a bit of time to sort out which parts of Begin's hardline rhetoric deserved to be taken most seriously, but by the fall it was becoming clear that the original plan for convening a peace conference in Geneva was in serious trouble. The critical reaction in U.S. public opinion to the U.S.-Soviet statement of 1 October 1977 calling for a reconvening of the Geneva conference was a blow to Carter. Sadat's subsequent surprise offer to go to Jerusalem reshuffled the deck, opening the possibility of a fast track to an Egyptian-Israeli agreement that might serve as a model for later negotiations on other fronts. By early 1978, Carter had concluded that he needed to go forward quickly with the Egyptian-Israeli talks, and he had also determined that Sadat did not need much on the Palestinian front as political cover for what was likely to be perceived as a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace.We will never know what Carter might have done on Arab-Israeli issues if he had won a second term or if the Iranian revolution had not occurred. But it was not a Cold War mindset that led him away from seeking a comprehensive Middle East peace. Instead, this shift was spurred by the intricacies of Middle East politics and Begin's adamancy that he would not deal with the “Arabs of Eretz Israel” and would never abandon any part of Judea and Samaria, as he always called the West Bank. Domestic politics also inevitably played a role.Jackson is correct that the failure of U.S. diplomacy in the 1970s to move toward a comprehensive Middle East peace in cooperation with the Soviet Union was a serious blow for the policy of détente. The Reagan administration was filled with people, including some Democrats, who had rallied to Reagan as the best hope for leading the campaign against the “evil empire.” Many former Democrats, some deeply angry about the tough-minded way Carter had treated Israel, flocked to the ranks of the Committee on the Present Danger. Amazingly, Reagan, and then George H. W. Bush, and especially Bush's able Secretary of State James Baker, managed to keep the possibility of U.S.-Soviet cooperation alive during and after the Iraq crisis of 1990–1991, culminating with the Madrid Conference in the fall of 1991. That last effort at a comprehensive Middle East peace was very close to what Carter had envisaged in 1977, and, if Bush had been reelected, he and his new secretary of state might have made serious headway on both the Syrian and the Palestinian fronts, especially when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in power. But it was left to Bill Clinton to pursue the elusive peace process, and by the end of his two terms the prospects for a comprehensive Middle East peace had essentially disappeared, as had the Cold War and the mentality it had spawned. The “peace process” remained in a comatose state during the period of U.S. global preponderance in the 1990s. If the current era is evolving into a new Cold War, perhaps with both Russia and China, Jackson has already warned us with this fine book about how a Cold War mindset might again interfere with sensible U.S. foreign policymaking.
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