A Lost Peace Jackson, Galen
2023, 2023-04-15
eBook
In A Lost Peace , Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the June 1967 Middle ...East war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October 1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing deterioration of US-Soviet relations. The standard explanation for why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain. Jackson challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to scholars, Jackson reveals that the United States and the Soviet Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during the 1970s.
Standard explanations for the demise of U.S.-Soviet détente during the 1970s emphasize the Soviet Union's inability to put aside its communist ideology for the sake of a more cooperative relationship ...with the United States. Soviet resistance to reaching a stable accommodation during this period, many analysts maintain, was especially evident in the Middle East, where Moscow is said to have embraced the “radical Arab program” vis-à-vis Israel. Such accounts do not fare well, however, in light of the historical evidence. Instead, that evidence indicates that the Soviet Union was eager to cooperate with the United States to achieve an Arab-Israeli agreement. The Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford administrations, however, were not interested in working with the Soviets in the Middle East, and instead sought to expel them from the region. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates about whether great power rivals can cooperate on issues where their strategic interests are overlapping, as well as for contemporary debates over U.S. policy toward countries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
Strategy and Two-Level Games Jackson, Galen E.
Journal of cold war studies,
08/2017, Letnik:
19, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
How and to what extent do domestic political considerations influence U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East? This article addresses that question by drawing on declassified records ...that enable scholars to reevaluate the Carter administration's search for an Arab-Israeli settlement. Politics at home greatly affected U.S. policy. Moreover, the way such factors affected Carter's Middle East diplomacy was largely a function of the type of domestic political strategy the president chose to rely on. Had Carter and his advisers been more skilled as political operatives, the outcome of the peace negotiations might have been fundamentally different, especially on the issue of Israeli settlements policy. Thus, this article highlights the crucial importance of playing the “two-level game” for effective statecraft, a concept that has not been given adequate attention in the scholarly literature on the subject.
How influential are domestic politics on U.S. foreign affairs? With regard to Middle East policy, how important a role do ethnic lobbies, Congress, and public opinion play in influencing U.S. ...strategy? Answering these questions requires the use of archival records and other primary documents, which provide an undistorted view of U.S. policymakers' motivations. The Ford administration's 1975 reassessment of its approach to Arab-Israeli statecraft offers an excellent case for the examination of these issues in light of this type of historical evidence. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger decided, in large part because of the looming 1976 presidential election, to avoid a confrontation with Israel in the spring and summer of 1975 by choosing to negotiate a second disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel rather than a comprehensive settlement. Nevertheless, domestic constraints on the White House's freedom of action were not insurmountable and, had they had no other option, Ford and Kissinger would have been willing to engage in a showdown with Israel over the Middle East conflict's most fundamental aspects. The administration's concern that a major clash with Israel might stoke an outbreak of anti-Semitism in the United States likely contributed to its decision to back down.
As was evident from the intense reaction to Donald Trump's comments during the 2016 presidential campaign about nuclear proliferation, many analysts believe that the United States has consistently ...given the goal of nonproliferation a top priority since the beginning of the nuclear age. That conviction, in turn, plays a major role in policy debates among experts in this area. In this article, I show that nonproliferation does not necessarily take precedence over other important US geopolitical interests through a close examination of American policy toward the Israeli nuclear program during the 1960s. Although nonproliferation goals certainly came into play, US officials repeatedly gave priority to other key objectives and, to a real extent, even believed that Israel's nuclearization could hold certain strategic advantages. This finding, of course, has important theoretical implications for the basic question of whether international politics still works essentially as it did in the pre-nuclear era, as well as for policy debates over nuclear proliferation.
An enduring debate among scholars of security studies centers on the question of the extent to which domestic political considerations influence U.S. foreign policy. How influence are such factors in ...shaping the United States' approach to international affairs? Do ethnic lobbies and public opinion play a substantial role in influence the choices made by American leaders? In particular, does the domestic context in the United States affect significantly the manner in which U.S. strategists deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict? Or does the concern for advancing Washington's interests in the Middle East dominate political pressures at home?
Claims about Soviet policy at the end of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war played a key role in discrediting détente in the mid- and late 1970s. This analysis considers the part that Henry Kissinger ...played in triggering the Soviet actions at the end of the war to which the critics of détente pointed. Contrary to what Kissinger claimed, he essentially reneged on the agreement he had reached with the Soviet leadership to end the war and instead directly encouraged the Israelis to continue military operations well after the ceasefire was supposed to take effect. That, in turn, led to a crisis that had a profound effect on Soviet-American relations for years to come.
According to John Mearsheimer, the United States entered the First World War because the Wilson administration believed the Triple Entente was on the verge of defeat. As a result, he claims, the ...Americans entered the war to prevent Germany from becoming a regional hegemon in Europe. A careful and targeted examination of the relevant primary sources, however, demonstrates that Washington was largely unaware of the plight of the Allied powers in the spring of 1917; therefore, the argument that the United States was acting as an offshore balancer at this time is unconvincing. This article shows that unit-level factors and statecraft can play a larger role in international relations than structural realist theory allows and makes an empirical contribution to the World War I literature by demonstrating that balance of power considerations were not a major factor in the Wilson administration's decision for war.
In the aftermath of the June 1967 Six-Day War, both the United States and the Soviet Union had powerful incentives to achieve a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute. With each superpower ...concerned that the conflict’s continuation would jeopardize its regional interests and, more significantly, worried that it could ultimately lead to a direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation that might conceivably escalate to the nuclear level, strategists in Washington and Moscow were intensely interested in solving the problem via negotiation. Moreover, the superpowers wielded substantial influence with the parties to the dispute. From a power political standpoint, thus, one would expect that the two sides would have cooperated to settle the matter. Yet, in the end, precisely the opposite occurred. This deeply puzzling outcome is the heart of this dissertation; in its simplest terms, my goal is to show what prevented Washington and Moscow from working together to solve the Arab-Israeli problem and, in so doing, I use the Middle East as a window to explain what drove the continuation of the Cold War as a time when a lessening of superpower tensions seemed possible. Utilizing a mass of primary source—and especially archival—evidence, I show that this result was primarily attributable to two variables. First, American domestic political factors consistently constrained U.S. decision-makers in their formulation of Middle East policy and thereby limited their ability to pursue a cooperative approach with the Soviets on the issue. Second, it turns out that the United States was simply not interested in settling the conflict in conjunction with Moscow. Despite the Kremlin’s willingness to contribute helpfully to the achievement of a stable Arab-Israeli settlement, U.S. officials’ deeply anti-Soviet views led them to eschew superpower collaboration and, in fact, resulted in their making the reduction of USSR influence in the Middle East a top priority. In short, the United States throughout this period pursued a strategy in the region that was profoundly inconsistent with power political considerations, an approach that was bound to contribute to the undermining of détente in the late 1970s.
Deadlock Jackson, Galen
A Lost Peace,
04/2023
Book Chapter
This chapter looks at how the Arab–Israeli conflict might trigger a great power war. It seeks to answer the questions: What interest did the Soviet Union have in going to war for the sake of its Arab ...clients, Egypt and Syria? As for the Americans, they had a fundamental interest in Israel's security, but what interest did they have in supporting that country's enlargement beyond the prewar boundaries, when pursuing that sort of policy was bound to poison US relations with the Arab world? The chapter recounts that the United States and the Soviet Union found it hard to work together for Middle East peace in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. It then analyzes why US policymakers think that an Arab–Israeli settlement was strongly in Washington's interest and why the peace terms that the Americans had in mind make cooperation with the Soviets impossible. Even if they wanted a deal, the chapter investigates why Johnson-administration officials believed that the domestic political constraints they faced were such that they would not be able to put real pressure on Israel to accept a reasonable agreement. Ultimately, the chapter asks why USSR policy so disproportionately favor the Arabs that US–Soviet cooperation was simply out of the question.
