Superpower Agency and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War

Abstract

One of the key challenges for scholars studying U.S. and Soviet power in the Third World has been to account for the agency of non-Western actors. In episodes ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Americans and Soviets found themselves hamstrung in small wars, fighting seemingly inferior opponents that were nevertheless able to block or at least complicate superpower ambitions. How much agency should historians assign to Third World actors, small states, and nonstate groups? It might be argued that during the Cold War, local players made their own history, but they did not always do so under circumstances of their choosing; rather, they did it under circumstances and structures created by the superpowers. By connecting the superpower politics of détente to the local dynamics of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Craig Daigle’s book offers a bold defense of superpower agency. The book focuses on the origins of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, casting the regional story through the lens of the Cold War. Daigle’s core argument is that superpower détente helped to set the stage for war between Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The war was thus a “consequence of détente” (p. 331). During the same time that superpower rapprochement sought to reduce tensions between Moscow and Washington, Daigle explains, it threatened to freeze a fundamentally unacceptable status quo in the Middle East, leaving leaders in Cairo and Damascus with no other recourse than to go to war against Israeli military forces occupying Egyptian and Syrian territory. Cold War détente helped to produce an untenable stalemate in Egyptian–Israeli relations. Daigle’s time in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State is on display throughout. The author has mined the American archives to produce the best-documented account of U.S. policy toward the Egyptian–Israeli rivalry in the immediate run-up to the 1973 war.