In this readable and at times dramatic study, Craig Daigle offers a complex perspective on the nuclear superpower era of détente, discussing both the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Arab-Israeli conflict during a four-year time span that witnessed two Middle Eastern wars. Daigle draws particularly on U.S. State Department archival documents and memoirs by former Soviet, Arab, and Israeli officials. He maintains that the 1969–1970 War of Attrition and the October 1973 war between Israeli and Arab armies resulted not only from tensions and competing interests between the Middle East belligerents, but also from policies adopted in both Washington and Moscow toward their clients. As the title indicates, détente as an effort at cooperative relationships and a new period of non-war in global affairs had a mixed, indeed limited, record of achievement. For the most part, the Arab-Israeli conflict caused problems for détente, and détente exacerbated Arab-Israeli tensions, with not much to show when the October 1973 war came to a close.Relaxing strained superpower relations had antecedents before Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Washington and Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Gromyko in Moscow took international center stage. Dwight Eisenhower had invited Nikita Khrushchev to Camp David and his own farm in Gettysburg in an effort to ease U.S.-Soviet tensions. In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy began negotiations with Moscow that led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Lyndon Johnson pursued arms control, mutual and balanced force reductions in Central Europe, scientific and cultural exchanges, and the liberalization of trade and travel restrictions between Western and Warsaw Pact countries. He also hosted a major summit with Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin at Glassboro State College in New Jersey to facilitate the quest for arms control with the Soviet Union. Attempting to relax European stresses and strains, French President Charles de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt sought a more far-reaching rapprochement with their Eastern-bloc neighbors.What placed Nixon, earlier known as a Cold Warrior, in a special category was his pursuit of détente as the centerpiece of his administration's foreign policy. In early 1969, his national security adviser, Kissinger, conveyed to Soviet leaders that Nixon would be striving for “an era of negotiations, not confrontation.” Building a stable world order despite “irrevocable antagonisms” (in the words of John Lewis Gaddis) would be the order of the day. Central to this new bilateralism would be efforts to limit nuclear and conventional arms, to prevent nuclear warfare, to foster scientific and cultural agreements, to expand trade relations, to alleviate tensions surrounding Berlin, and to bring the war in Indochina to a satisfactory end.This incipient relationship was affected by the Middle East as it evolved after the June 1967 war. Helmut Sonnenfeldt, an aide to Kissinger specializing on Soviet affairs, wrote to Nixon and Kissinger, “The US needed to remain in touch with the Soviets on the Middle East because it may be one … way of preventing renewed large-scale hostilities with potential for a direct US-Soviet military clash” and because the Soviet Union possessed “great influence” with Egypt, “the key to any tranquilization of Middle East tensions and dangers.” Less than two months after coming to office, Nixon moved forward with what became known as the Two Power talks, believing this regional dispute could be solved only through the participation of the superpowers.Surprisingly, Nixon chose Secretary of State William Rogers to lead the U.S. side in these bilateral deliberations. Daigle, in analyzing Rogers's efforts to untangle the Egyptian-Israeli knot, places the long-time presidential friend on a much higher pedestal than he stood at the time. Throughout this period, I was legislative assistant for foreign affairs to U.S. Senator Frank Church and followed these events closely. Neither Church nor other senators who were deeply involved in foreign policy, such as J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, and Clifford Case, believed that Rogers was a major contributor. Nixon and Kissinger as a team played the great-power chessboard and linked the various issues, whereas Rogers testified only infrequently before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.Daigle is the only scholar I am aware of who raises Rogers's profile and praises his diplomatic importance. Perhaps, as Daigle admits in the book's acknowledgments, this is because he had access to Rogers's papers and the full cooperation of Rogers's family, who helped to “shape my views on their father.” Daigle is fair, however, in assessing Rogers's point of view. The secretary of state left Cairo in May 1971,” Daigle writes, “confident that in Sadat the United States had found a leader capable of making the difficult choices to broker peace with the Israelis. Yet two years later it was Sadat who started the October War.”With help from Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco, Rogers laid out a peace plan that could be imposed on Israel and Egypt. According to Daigle, the plan failed for numerous reasons. For one thing, Soviet leaders did not budge from their desire to maintain close ties with Egypt. Neither Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin nor Foreign Minister Gromyko, according to original documentation, viewed Rogers as a credible counterpart. Kissinger himself believed that Rogers was second-rate, and he sought to marginalize him, something Nixon did little to prevent. Rogers, for his part, did not take the time to improve relations with the major actors in Jerusalem and Cairo. Rogers was especially inept in dealing with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Daigle cites at least six times in the book what Rogers had glibly labeled her “trauma of 1957,” when Israeli military forces were forced to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip without any promise that Egypt in return would enter negotiations with Israel or guarantee the lifting of the blockade of the Straits of Tiran. Rogers's limitations as a policymaker and his superficial appraisal of Meir left him in an uninfluential position.During the War of Attrition in 1969–1970, the United States became Israel's chief arms supplier after the Soviet Union transferred SA-3 surface-to-air missiles, a highly advanced air-defense system, to ten sites along the Suez Canal and beyond, followed by two regiments of MiG-21 fighters and SA-7 portable antiaircraft missiles. By mid-summer, 10,000 Soviet troops followed, as did an additional “batch” of missiles to defend Egyptian cities and towns, accompanied by 1,000 Soviet military personnel to operate the sophisticated weapons systems. In pursuing Operation Kavkaz, Soviet leaders decided that Soviet soldiers and pilots would be disguised in Egyptian uniforms and their aircraft painted with Egyptian markings, despite Egyptian President Gamal Abdel al-Nasser's pleadings to be open.Daigle hints that Nixon and Kissinger, playing linkage politics, may have responded to these bold Soviet moves in mid-April 1970 by sending U.S. forces into Cambodia in an expansion of the Vietnam War. The superpower rivalry also extended to South Asia, where the key U.S. ally, Pakistan, ignited a fierce civil war in East Pakistan, soon to become the independent Bangladesh, supported by India and the Soviet Union. An Israel-Egypt cease-fire was agreed to in the summer.But new regional tensions arose in September 1970 when Jordan openly went to war on its soil to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Syrians intervened against Jordan in September, openly shelling Da'ara on the Syrian-Jordanian border (the same town where the 2011 uprising against the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship began) and sending three armored brigades across the border. Nixon was determined to preserve Jordanian King Hussein's Hashemite regime and the cease-fire agreement. According to Daigle, at this point, “Nixon and Kissinger viewed the Syrian invasion as a ‘Soviet-inspired insurrection’ that had to be met with force.” Israel, with a green light from Washington, intervened on the side of King Hussein, using its air force to go after the invading Syrians, who withdrew several days later.In the end, Hussein held on to power, the PLO was defeated and expelled from Jordan, and the War of Attrition drew to a close. Nixon and Kissinger became convinced that the Soviet Union had stoked the conflict by encouraging the Syrians to move into Jordan. Soon thereafter, Nasser suffered a fatal heart attack and was replaced by Anwar al-Sadat, who eventually kicked the Soviet military out of Egypt, established new contacts with the United States, and, after losing another war with Israel in 1973, signed a momentous peace treaty with Israel in 1979.In the context of détente, efforts to deal with the Middle East did not work well from the U.S. perspective. Kissinger warned Brezhnev: “The trouble is, the Arabs cannot win a war, and the Israelis cannot achieve a peace by their own efforts.” Brezhnev, Daigle argues, “desperately wanted to avoid a superpower confrontation in the Middle East and move forward with détente,” but “in the end his desire to remain the ‘convinced Communist,’ willing to take whatever actions necessary to defend Soviet political and military interests, won the day.” Nixon and Kissinger were also disappointed by Soviet positions in strategic arms talks, by Moscow's stepped-up arms supplies to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, and by the slow progress in trade talks. As Jacob Beam, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow wrote, “the conduct of our relations with the USSR seemed to have reached a ‘marking time stage.’”This is the way Sadat read the superpower situation. According to Daigle, declassified back-channel messages between Cairo and Washington indicate that Sadat's primary motive in starting a war with Israel was not to defeat the Jewish state militarily (an outcome he knew he could not achieve) but to reignite the political process by creating a “crisis of détente,” drawing the United States and the Soviet Union into a regional conflict and forcing them to back away from the “no war, no peace” situation that had ensued in the Middle East as a result of their détente. The October 1973 war prompted Nixon to put U.S. military forces on Defcon-3 alert, the highest level of readiness for peacetime conditions, and spurred Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy.What about détente? Kissinger believed the policy had passed a significant test in October 1973. It had not prevented the regional conflict, but it had defined “a strategy for a relationship between adversaries.” Kissinger also believed that détente had reduced Soviet influence in the Middle East, “making progress under the cover of détente,” Daigle argues. In a speech at the end of October, Brezhnev said his government would welcome Nixon to Moscow in 1974 and would take practical steps toward East-West troop reductions in Europe as early as 1975.Daigle believes the October 1973 war demonstrated the limits of détente. “Both superpowers could have brought the war to a quick end by calling for an immediate cease-fire in the UN Security Council,” but they instead decided to play for time on behalf of their respective clients. “They chose to begin a massive airlift in weapons,” thereby “prolonging the war and exacerbating tensions in Soviet-American relations.” Daigle concludes that “the October War was in large part a product of Soviet-American relations and decision-making during the previous four and a half years and thus was a consequence of détente.” Yet Sadat's strategy proved successful. “Although he had suffered a near catastrophic defeat and the near destruction of the Egyptian Third Army, he accomplished in three weeks what he had been unable to accomplish in three years: moving the Arab-Israeli crisis to the forefront of American foreign policy and beginning the process that would lead to the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian hands.”