Nixon's Second Term: Policy Prospects in the Middle East

Abstract

President Nixon is now riding high diplomatically on the successes of his first term: the detente with the communist world marked by his visits to Peking and Moscow, and the Paris agreement to end the war in Southeast Asia. Having won a sweeping victory in the final electoral campaign of his long political career, he is more than ever in a position to think of his remaining acts of state in the context of his eventual place in history. By his own recent testimony, nowhere does this challenge present itself more insistently than in the Middle East, where the basic crisis remains unresolved and, as he has often remarked, the danger is greatest of an eventual deterioration into an AmericanSoviet conflict. Furthermore, with the energy crisis coming into public attention for the first time and two-thirds of the world's oil reserves concentrated in the Middle East, what had once been a distant and theoretical apprehension that the Arab states might one day develop a major political weapon against the United States and its industrial partners, to compensate for their military weakness against Israel, now looms as a distinct material danger if not within Mr. Nixon's remaining years in office, then in those of his successor. These being the circumstances, there are widespread expectations that Nixon may be girding his loins for a major diplomatic initiative, aimed at crowning his career with a breakthrough in the Middle Eastern deadlock. He may well be thinking in such ambitious general terms himself; and it will be surprising indeed if a renewed diplomatic effort of some sort is not forthcoming. Whether it will be of a sort that can really be expected to lead to a breakthrough, however, is a very different question; and in the light of the way things have gone in the Middle East and elsewhere in the past few years, it would not be altogether surprising for the Nixon administration to satisfy itself with the conclusion privately, at least that a breakthrough is not only unattainable at a price it is willing to pay, but not really necessary at all.