14

Alignment

The state of israel was born out of a great storm of crashing empires, clashing nationalisms, and the emergence of a new world system based on the hostile rivalry of nuclear superpowers. It took another storm to bring Israel and the United States into strategic alignment. The United States rebounded so robustly from the crisis of the 1970s that even those who lived through those years can forget how disorientating and terrifying the tempest actually was. Defeat followed dishonor and failure followed shock during five years of crisis as the Bretton Woods monetary system collapsed, the Vietnam War ended in humiliating defeat and humanitarian tragedy, a wild burst of inflation fueled by exploding energy prices challenged the prosperity of the American middle class, and a series of scandals ranging from the revelations of CIA skullduggery to Watergate undermined Americans’ faith in the health of their institutions and the righteousness of their state.

As we’ve seen, the chaos and confusion of world events in the late 1940s made the rationale behind Truman’s Israel policy difficult to follow, and Vulcanist conjectures about Truman’s policies took root at the time and have flourished ever since. Those conjectures and the pro- and anti-Zionist myths that they nurtured have helped obscure our understanding of one of the most consequential eras in the history of American statecraft.

A similar confusion attended the birth of what would ultimately grow into an alliance between the United States and the Jewish state. It is not hard to see why. The sudden rise in the power and wealth of the oil-producing Arab states was the most dramatic development of the 1970s. Israel was not so well placed. As Golda Meir observed in 1973, Moses had led the children of Israel through the Middle East for forty years only to bring them to the one place in the region with no oil.[1] It seemed obvious to many people at the time that the natural choice for American foreign policy was to distance itself from Israel to gain favor with the Arabs—and indeed, at the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the United States became the object of an oil boycott by Arab states precisely because of its support for the Jewish state. All the world needed Arab oil and hoped for Arab investments; why, except for Vulcanist influence, would the United States cozy up to Israel at a time like this?

Cozy, however, America did. The 1970s were the years in which Israel, previously banned from purchasing American arms, moved toward its future status as the largest single recipient of American military aid. These were the years in which AIPAC, previously a sleepy organization with little presence or power, ballooned to become a large and professionally staffed lobbying organization. These were the years in which the United States moved to the center stage of Middle East peacemaking, as Presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter made peace between Israel and its neighbors a major diplomatic objective. And these were also the years when a campaign to support the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel disrupted America’s pursuit of détente with Moscow.

Many observers believed that the United States was assuming even heavier burdens for the benefit of Israel. American aid to Egypt soared during the 1970s as Egypt moved from launching a war against Israel in 1973 to becoming the first Arab nation to sign a comprehensive peace treaty with the Jewish state just six years later. From the standpoint of Vulcanist analysis, there could be only one reason for this turn of events. The implacably powerful Israel lobby was forcing huge Egyptian aid packages through Congress as a bribe to keep Egypt on the peace train. To add up the full cost of our new Israeli friendship, these analysts insisted, one must total up the cost of the ill will pro-Israel policies generated in the Arab world, the money we lavished on direct aid to Israel, and the multibillion-dollar multiyear cost of the Egyptian “peace bribe.”

Only occult Jewish influence could account for such a dramatic shift in America’s orbit, many reasoned, and with Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, serving as secretary of state, the influence of “the Jews” on American foreign policy seemed obvious. But the Vulcanist analysis was, as usual, superficial. Far from undermining the American position in the Middle East, the alignment with Israel helped Nixon and his successors displace the Soviet Union and solidify America’s position in the Middle East just as the region’s resources and growing financial power became critical to America’s power worldwide.

To understand the Nixon-Kissinger Israel policy we must step back briefly to take account of the national, global, and regional context in which the key decisions were taken. At home, American society was even more bitterly divided in the late 1960s than it would become half a century later. The long era of post–World War II prosperity was challenged as foreign competition began to eat into the profit margins of American manufacturers and slow the growth of blue-collar living standards. The “stagflation” of the 1970s, fed by the energy crises of the decade as well as by imprudent Vietnam era fiscal policy, saw the first serious decline in middle-class economic expectations since the Depression. The early stages of the feminist and gay rights movements were leading Americans to question their basic moral values and the structure of the family. The use of marijuana, LSD, and opiates exploded across an alienated younger generation even as old moral certainties and taboos collapsed. The civil rights movement forced Americans to confront the continuing legacy of American racism, and racial tensions regularly erupted late in the 1960s in staggering episodes of urban violence that, in the case of the 1967 riot in Detroit, could not be suppressed without the dispatch of regular army troops.

The still raging Vietnam War—fought by an army of draftees, with an American death toll ten times that of George W. Bush’s Iraq War—embittered American politics and drove millions of young people into antiwar activism. Revelations of atrocities committed by American forces and of deceit on the part of American political and military authorities touched off firestorms in public opinion. A generation of American military and civilian leadership was scarred by the experience of the war and of the ensuing defeat—the first unambiguous military defeat in a serious war since the founding of the American republic. Richard Nixon had not started the war, although he shared the intellectual and political assumptions that made it look necessary to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that waged it, nor was he responsible for the strategic and political choices that left the United States irretrievably entangled in an unwinnable war. But on taking office, he was not only confronted with an intractable military and diplomatic problem in Indochina; he was faced with a multifaceted crisis of American foreign policy for which no simple solution existed.

To begin with, the economic foundations of the postwar order looked increasingly unsustainable. As American leaders scrambled to stabilize the international economy after World War II, they erected a set of institutions that reflected the conditions of the late 1940s in which the United States held more than half the world’s gold reserves, contained half the world’s manufacturing capacity, and was the world’s only nuclear weapons state, the largest producer of agricultural goods, the largest producer of energy, and, by an almost infinite degree, the largest and richest consumer market in the world.[2] America’s postwar goal was to reduce rather than perpetuate this dangerous and unsustainable pre-eminence. Unless other countries could recover from the war and regain their prosperity, the United States would have no foreign customers for its products, no strong military allies in the struggle with communism, and the poverty and misery of postwar Europe would make communism appealing to the peoples of the region. To avoid this outcome, the United States would open its markets to foreign goods on a nonreciprocal basis to encourage global recovery while promoting American aid and investment abroad, maintaining a stable system of exchange rates, and bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of the common defense.

By 1969 the global economic picture had radically changed. Led by West Germany and Japan, defeated enemies and impoverished allies had come roaring back. European countries and Japan were running large trade surpluses with the United States, with the resulting balance of payments deficits placing an increasingly unsustainable pressure on the $35 an ounce fixed price of gold that underpinned the Bretton Woods currency system.[3] America’s newly vigorous allies resented what they saw as a heavy-handed and outmoded form of American dominance in free world (as the anticommunist coalition in the Cold War was often known) policymaking. The Vietnam War and the evidence of American divisions at home had undercut their respect for American leadership and stability; the American alliance system could no longer be managed in the old, quasi-proconsular way.

Meanwhile, the military underpinnings of containment were failing. The American strategy to contain the Soviet Union and its communist ideology revolved around two sometimes competing and sometimes complementary approaches. One, championed by the Eisenhower administration as a way of reducing both the risks and costs of the Cold War, was the so-called massive retaliation approach. The Soviet Union and its allies were put on notice that attacks on the status quo could result in an annihilating wave of nuclear retaliation. This allowed President Eisenhower to pass eight years in the White House during which the Soviet Union was largely contained without involving American forces in a war, but it also had drawbacks that the military strategists who rallied to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign were not slow to identify.

Massive retaliation might be a useful tool in its way, but it increased the risk of what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles infelicitously called “brinkmanship,” in which threats of nuclear war became a standard diplomatic tool in American policy. This policy of periodically invoking the prospect of a civilization-ending conflict tested the outer limits of morality, was deeply unsettling to American and allied public opinion, and was not suitable for every problem that the expansion of communism presented to the United States. What, for example, did massive retaliation offer as a response to a communist-backed guerrilla insurgency in a small postcolonial state? One could hardly threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear destruction, a destruction that would necessarily lead to great losses in the United States as the Soviets retaliated in turn, over the occupation of a provincial capital in Laos by a communist militia. The United States needed policy options for smaller challenges, or it risked helplessness in the face of communist expansion in the postcolonial world.

The Kennedy administration’s response had been to emphasize a variety of military and civilian responses to the potential range of threats. Development aid and democracy promotion would reduce the appeal of communist ideology in key countries. The CIA would provide training, information, and sometimes more direct if less respectable assistance to local anticommunist forces. And on the military side, Americans would enhance the capacity of local forces and increase America’s counterinsurgency capabilities through new specialized military units like the Green Berets. Flexible response, as this family of new approaches was known, would, proponents hoped, calm the international scene and reduce the need for Dulles-style brinkmanship even as it enabled the United States to contain the communist threat more effectively than before.

The problem for the incoming Nixon administration was that both strategies appeared to have failed. Massive retaliation, in addition to its other disadvantages, suffered a crippling blow as the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal approached strategic parity with the United States. Through the 1950s the United States had a significantly greater nuclear arsenal than its Soviet rival; by the 1970s that advantage had largely disappeared. In a world of strategic nuclear parity, the threat of massive retaliation lost credibility. Nuclear weapons might deter a Soviet strike against the United States or its treaty allies but could not credibly deter against less dramatic forms of Soviet adventurism.

The Vietnam experience made flexible response equally problematic. The full arsenal of tactics in the flexible response textbook had been used in Vietnam. Economic development, governance reform, military training, and intelligence cooperation in counterinsurgency operations followed by massive direct American military intervention had all failed to halt the communist advance. Worse, from the standpoint of committed Cold Warriors, the political consequences of the Vietnam failure inside the United States ensured that Congress would resist U.S. participation in Vietnam-style counterinsurgency campaigns anywhere in the world.

Yet even as the tools in their anticommunist tool kit lost their utility, American policymakers in the early 1970s worried about a new wave of communist and far-left advances around the world. In Latin America, the government of Chilean Marxist president Salvador Allende was, despite its narrow electoral base, pursuing a radical transformation of the Chilean economy and society. The fall of Saigon ensured communist victories in the smaller countries of Indochina. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union had emerged as the paymaster and arms supplier of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and seemed poised to extend its reach across the region. The Soviet Union and its Cuban proxies were increasingly engaged in guerrilla wars across sub-Saharan Africa.

It was all about to get worse. As Henry Kissinger recalls, early on President Nixon sent him to consult with George Shultz. “You don’t know anything about economics,” Nixon told Kissinger. “So go talk to Shultz about what’s going on.”

Then serving as secretary of labor before moving on to head the Office of Management and Budget and ultimately the Treasury Department under Nixon, Shultz had some disturbing information. The oil market, he said, was due to explode. Demand was rising faster than supply, and the American dependence on imported oil from the Middle East was steadily increasing as domestic production stagnated.[4]

The first oil price shock came in 1973. As the Watergate crisis crippled Richard Nixon’s political authority at home, the price of oil tripled in six months. An Arab oil boycott to retaliate against the United States for supporting Israel in its 1973 October War against Egypt and Syria highlighted America’s new dependency on the Middle East even as policymakers around the world struggled to adapt to a new world of energy shortages and skyrocketing prices. New wealth surged into the oil-producing Arab states and managing both the geopolitical and the economic consequences of a historic wealth transfer from energy-consuming to energy-producing countries would become one of America’s highest priorities in the troubled 1970s. For decades to come the Middle East would figure prominently in American foreign policy—and in American politics at home.

Crises came thick and fast in those years at a pace Americans would not experience again until the Trump and Biden years. The 1973 war between Israel, Egypt, and Syria began on October 6 and ended October 25. The infamous “Saturday night massacre,” in which the attorney general of the United States and his deputy resigned rather than carry out Richard Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, occurred on October 20.[5]

Political leaders in addition to Nixon tumbled like ninepins across the world of the western alliance in 1974. A spy scandal forced West German chancellor Willy Brandt to resign.[6] After nine days in office his interim successor was replaced by Helmut Schmidt.[7] Not to be outdone, France also had three leaders in 1974 as Georges Pompidou died in office, Senate president Alain Poher briefly filled in,[8] and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected to succeed him.[9] In normally staid Britain, a February election led to the first hung Parliament since the 1930s and a second election after eight months produced a weak Labour government.[10] In Japan, a scandal forced the resignation of the powerful and popular prime minister Kakuei Tanaka.[11] When Turkey invaded Cyprus and defeated a government backed by the ruling junta in Greece, the Greek military government fell after seven years in power.[12] In Portugal, the long-established Estado Novo dictatorship was overthrown in a military coup.[13] In this context, the comprehensive and humiliating 1975 defeat of America’s allies in Indochina appeared to mark an important stage in the irreversible decline of American power.

Behind the scenes, however, the American revival was already under way. Within a decade, the United States had regained its political balance at home, laid the groundwork for a generation of global economic expansion, restored its alliances, and embarked on the path that led to the defeat of the Soviet Union, leading to a period of American predominance matched only by the height of American power after World War II.

These extraordinary developments constitute one of the defining achievements in the history of American statecraft but have not yet received their just due. Partly because the disgrace of Watergate justly taints Nixon’s legacy, partly because episodes like the murderous Chilean coup of September 1973 cast a moral shadow over American choices in those years, and partly because the passions unleashed by the Vietnam War would forever shape the memory and the intellectual approaches of the generation of scholars who came of age in that era, the great American revival receives less attention than it deserves. That is not only unjust to the memory of those involved; it deprives later generations of an understanding of a complex episode in the history of American power whose lessons, positive and negative, provide insights into the wellsprings of success in American foreign policy that we cannot safely ignore.

Understood in its proper historical context, the U.S-Israel alignment was a central element of the establishment of a new, America-based regional order in the Middle East, and that regional order in turn was one of a series of readjustments and realignments that both grew from and facilitated the revival of American power. We shall briefly describe the Nixonian order that, under the leadership of Henry Kissinger with substantial support from George Shultz, emerged from the Nixon-Ford era before looking at how the new U.S.-Israel relationship bolstered the new system in the Middle East and beyond.

Two basic ideas underpinned the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford era. The first was that some American commitments had become unsustainable. The war in Indochina could not be won. The Bretton Woods monetary system, with its fixed exchange rate regime and the dollar’s peg to a fixed price in gold, was no longer viable. The United States could not stand on the front lines against communism and Soviet power in every country and every region of the world. American foreign policy was going to have to adjust to the new circumstances, and that meant abandoning some commitments. In addition to retreating from economic commitments like Bretton Woods, and open-ended military commitments to clients in places like Indochina, America would have to scale back its ideological and humanitarian goals as well. Rigid and moralistic anticommunism on the John Foster Dulles model could no longer be the basis for American Cold War strategy. The opening to China and the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union demonstrated a more pragmatic approach toward communist regimes. Détente with Leonid Brezhnev’s authoritarian Soviet Union was a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow; in many ways the Nixon-Kissinger outreach to a communist China, then at the height of the murderous frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, was a more shocking departure from the moral foundations of American postwar policy.

Subsequent historians have generally forgiven Nixon and Kissinger for their realist approaches to the communist powers of the 1970s. Their pragmatism receives less indulgence when it comes to Nixon’s penchant for overlooking the crimes and shortcomings of American allies, whether it was support for Pakistan in its futile and vicious war against Bangladeshi independence; for the military dictatorships in Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Pinochet’s Chile; or American tolerance for dictatorial regional allies ranging from the Shah of Iran to the junta in Greece.

Historians and moralists will long debate the merits of these decisions, but to Nixon and Kissinger the retreat from ideological anticommunism and from a human rights agenda in the noncommunist world were both necessary elements in a strategy of fitting American commitments to American resources. The American ship of state was caught in a dangerous storm; unnecessary baggage had to be thrown overboard.

The Nixon policy was less of a retreat than a rebalancing. The United States needed to adapt, but the country was not in decline. The success of the American-led international order at promoting the recovery and revival of so many other countries might mean a decline in relative American power. But it also meant that the international system on which American power ultimately rested was stronger than ever before and that American allies were more capable and more deeply aligned with the United States. By sloughing off outdated commitments and attitudes, Washington could position itself to take advantage of the growing strength of an international system that put the United States firmly at the center of world events.

Germany and Japan were no longer jealous rivals seeking to overturn the international system. They were increasingly zealous upholders of a system that offered them unprecedented economic opportunities while ensuring their safety. If the United States was no longer, to use President Kennedy’s phrase, prepared to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” to protect freedom around the world, other countries were increasingly ready and willing to step up to the task. The American world system could stabilize, develop, and grow even as the burdens the system imposed were more broadly distributed among the states large and small, rich and poor, who benefited from the American order.

At the same time, American policy in important regional theaters shifted to reflect what was called the Nixon Doctrine. As Nixon explained it to a group of reporters in a 1969 press briefing in Guam, “As far as the problems of internal security are concerned, as far as the problems of military defense, except for the threat of a major power involving nuclear weapons, the United States is going to encourage and has a right to expect that this problem will be increasingly handled by, and the responsibility for it taken by, the Asian nations themselves.”[14] The same approach would guide Nixon’s approach to the Middle East and Latin America.

The new policies were largely successful in limiting communist advances, although the consequences for human rights and other less tangible American concerns were sometimes dire. In Latin America, military governments in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil harshly suppressed leftist movements in those key countries; the focus of radical left-wing politics in the Americas shifted away from the principal economies to tiny, resource-poor countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador. In Asia, where the bloody suppression of the Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s had eliminated the greatest communist threat outside Indochina, the early stages of the “Asian miracle” made communist ideology less attractive and significantly enhanced the value of aligning with the United States and its top regional ally Japan.

It was in the Middle East where the new strategy of working with regional partners to block Soviet influence would face its sternest tests and achieve its most important results. Even as the oil shortages and price increases put the Middle East at the center of global politics, the Nixon-Kissinger policies would result in the marginalization of the Soviet Union and the establishment of a regional order broadly compatible with American interests. That result in turn enhanced American power and prestige around the world. At a time when world politics revolved around energy, and when the oil-producing countries became major markets for arms sales, big infrastructure projects, and other big-ticket items even as their balance of payments surpluses made them vital players in global finance, the United States would be uniquely influential in the Persian Gulf and beyond. The Nixon strategy would survive the fall of the Shah of Iran, initially a more important regional partner for the United States than Israel or any of the Arab countries, to establish an era of American supremacy in the Middle East that endured into the twenty-first century.

This is the context out of which the U.S.-Israel alignment emerged, and far from being an obstacle to the close working relationship the United States formed with critical regional partners like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the relationship with Israel was a cornerstone of the new edifice of American power rising in the Middle East.

The Riddle and the Sphinx

Oil and the domestic and international consequences of the shift in production and pricing power to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) put the Middle East at the center of American politics and foreign policy in the 1970s. As far back as 1859 with Edwin Drake’s oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, the United States had become the first country to harness the power of oil to industry and transport in a major way, and for almost a century the United States largely dominated the burgeoning oil industry.[15] Even as domestic demand grew, American production largely kept up through the end of World War II, and as late as the early 1960s the United States only imported about 1 million barrels of oil a day. However, domestic production peaked in 1970 and began a slow but seemingly inexorable decline. In 1950 American fields produced 5.9 million barrels per day of petroleum while the U.S. economy consumed 6.5 million. As the U.S. approached its peak production in 1970 with 10 million barrels per day, the U.S. net imports of petroleum products reached 1.2 million barrels per day and spiked to 4.7 million by 1975.[16]

The consequences of this shift became clear in 1973 when the Arab members of OPEC announced an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and the Netherlands along with a drastic cut in production. It was only lifted in March of the following year after the first disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt enabled American negotiators to persuade their Arab counterparts that good faith progress toward full Israeli withdrawal was being made.[17]

During the embargo, oil spiked from $3 to $12 a barrel; it had risen $1 in total over the preceding twenty years.[18] Gas prices rose from 36 cents a gallon at the pump in 1972 to 53 cents in 1974—at a time when the average American car could travel less than fourteen miles on a gallon of gas while vans and pickup trucks averaged only 10.3 miles to the gallon.[19] A shaken government fumbled the policy response, and high prices were soon exacerbated by a serious national fuel shortage. All over America, drivers fumed for hours in long lines to buy high-priced gas. To cope with the problem, authorities imposed rationing, banned odd or even numbered license plates from shopping for fuel on certain days of the week, and imposed a national speed limit of 55 miles an hour.[20]

The rise of OPEC was that rare international event whose consequences directly and visibly affected the situation of every family in the United States. At a time when the median American household had an annual income of $12,050,[21] a homeowner who had paid $400 for heat in 1972 was paying $800 by 1975. The State of Oregon banned Christmas lights in 1973 to conserve electricity. Consumers around the country were disconnected for failure to pay their mounting utility bills.[22] While rising heating prices also had to do with complex government price regulations in place at the time, many Americans blamed everything on the Arabs. One of the earliest beneficiaries was Israel: in December 1973, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans sympathized more with Israel than with the Arabs, up 7 percent over an October poll.[23]

It was the biggest shock to the American economy and to the functioning of American society since World War II. The impact of the crisis would ripple through the global and American economies for the next decade. A global recession, ruinous inflation, and high unemployment shook the western world. A massive debt crisis in Latin America brought on both by the shock of higher energy prices and the frantic efforts of the banking system to find borrowers to help absorb the large cash balances of Arab clients plunged Latin America into a decade-long era of stagnation and retrenchment, and came close to toppling the American financial system. High energy prices meant that consumer discretionary income declined, denting demand even as the rising interest rates brought on by rising fuel prices stunted business investment. Even after the OPEC embargo was lifted, energy prices continued to rise and rose again after the fall of the Shah in 1979. Not until the mid-1980s would the American economy fully recover, and the stagnation in real wages for blue-collar Americans that began in the 1970s would last for decades to come.

International financial markets were much less sophisticated in the 1970s than they have since become. The massive flows of money into the coffers of the petrostates appeared to threaten both the financial stability and the economic prosperity of the industrialized world. Recycling the dollar surpluses of the oil producers became a major concern of American treasury secretaries and Federal Reserve officials. Unless the newly rich countries of OPEC could be persuaded to buy American products and to reinvest their holdings in American securities and American banks, the consequences for the American economy, and the world’s, looked grim.

The immense wealth pouring into the Middle East also made regional security a more pressing issue. In 1969 the situation was not bright. Great Britain and France, the two western powers with the most important ties to the Arab world, had lost most of their influence in the region. The French began the 1960s by accepting defeat in the Algerian War of Independence; in the following years French power and influence continued to wane from Syria to Morocco. In 1968 the British announced that they would withdraw their remaining forces from the Persian Gulf and “East of Suez” by 1971; in 1969 the pro-western King Idris was overthrown in Libya and the Qaddafi era began. The Soviet Union had enjoyed a close relationship with Egypt, largest and most powerful of the Arab states, since the 1950s. As pro-western regimes toppled in countries like Syria and Iraq, the new rulers turned to the Soviets for arms and aid. Now, as new oil wealth coursed through the region, the USSR seemed well placed to increase its influence.

Under these conditions, American policymakers saw few alternatives. The United States would somehow have to marginalize the Soviet Union in the Middle East even as it developed close and intimate partnerships with as many of the newly rich oil producers as possible. It would have to ensure the security of the oil producers (and the waters around them), whether against external powers like the Soviet Union or jealous regional rivals, so that no single power had the ability to interrupt the oil flow. It would have to persuade OPEC to use its pricing power wisely and moderately, keeping the price of oil below levels that would put the economies of the United States and its allies under unbearable stress. And it would have to ensure that American businesses and American banks were the privileged and preferred business partners of the newly rich Arabs, and that American diplomats had the necessary access and influence to ensure that American business got the lion’s share of the orders, contracts, and investments that would soon be pouring out of the Arab world.

That would not be an easy task under any circumstances, but the existence of the Jewish state further complicated the picture. After the 1967 war, Israel was in a strong but unstable situation. It was militarily supreme, diplomatically isolated, and, as an oil-importing economy, economically exposed. Having fought three wars with Arab states since 1948, Israel could not help viewing the huge transfers of wealth to the Arab world with deep alarm. Besides the conventional military superiority that it had demonstrated in both 1956 and 1967, Israel had become a nuclear weapons state by 1969. If Israel, reduced to the last extremity, were to use nuclear weapons in self-defense, the human, political, and economic consequences would be catastrophic for the United States and the world. Equally worrying, if Israel continually flaunted its nuclear arsenal to intimidate enemies and reassure its own population, the political pressure on neighboring states to develop nuclear weapons of their own would become irresistible. The United States did not want a destabilizing nuclear arms race in the region—especially as oil wealth would endow Arab countries with the economic resources needed for nuclear programs. Reopening the Suez Canal was another important American objective that required cooperation from Israel. Since 1967 Israeli forces had occupied the east bank of the Canal, and shipping from the Middle East had to detour around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe or the Americas.

American objectives in the region could not be met unless Israel felt secure—but how could a policy of reassuring Israel be squared with a policy of drawing closer to the Arabs? This was the riddle confronting American policymakers in the early 1970s; fortunately for Washington, the land of the Sphinx would produce a man who found the way forward for the United States, the conservative Arab countries, and the Jewish state.

The story of Anwar Sadat’s decision to shift Egyptian foreign policy from its Nasser-era pan-Arabist, anti-American, and anti-Israel orientation has been told and told well, most recently in Martin Indyk’s Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. There is no need to revisit the details of that story here, but Sadat’s visionary recasting of Egypt’s regional role led to a transformation of the American role in the Middle East.

Essentially, as Sadat contemplated the ruins of Nasser’s foreign policy following the catastrophe of the 1967 war, he reached a set of conclusions that would revolutionize the politics of the Middle East. The first and most fundamental of these was that the national interest of Egypt needed to guide Egyptian foreign policy, rather than the pursuit of a pan-Arab union that Egypt could not achieve, that no other Arab state really wanted, and that kept Egypt tied to a destructive radical and anti-Israel agenda. What Egypt most needed was the return of the territory in the Sinai that Israel seized in 1967. First and foremost that meant an Israeli withdrawal from the Suez Canal so that Egypt could reopen the canal and begin collecting the substantial fees from passing ships. Beyond that it meant recovering national dignity and honor by regaining every inch of lost territory and shifting from the Soviet Union to the United States as a source of military, economic, and technical aid.

These were difficult changes to make. For almost twenty years under Nasser’s leadership, Egyptians had been dazzled by the idea of a pan-Arab revival that would unite the Arab world under Egypt’s leadership, transform living standards through the wonders of a planned economy, and avenge the humiliations of 1948–49 and 1956 by defeating the hated “Zionist entity.” Now Anwar Sadat needed to accustom the Egyptian people to less ambitious but more achievable goals. To consolidate his authority to depart so radically from Nasser’s agenda, Sadat needed concrete achievements that would bolster his prestige. Complacency had made the Israeli military units on the east bank of the canal careless and sloppy. Sadat saw a historic opportunity to establish his leadership by attacking the Israelis. The first step toward peace would be war.

The Yom Kippur or October War of 1973, when Syria and Egypt attacked Israel on October 6, was the largest and to date the last of the four international conflicts between Israel and neighboring Arab states. It was also the most successful from the Egyptian point of view, ending with Egyptian forces holding, if tenuously, on to gains in Israeli-held territory on the east bank of the Suez Canal before the heavy fighting ended with a cease-fire on October 28.

The war was largely confined to the Sinai and the Golan Heights, the territory Israeli forces seized during the 1967 war. On both fronts, Egypt and Syria achieved significant initial successes, with Egyptian forces crossing the Suez Canal and penetrating several miles into the Sinai, and Syrian tanks moving well into Israeli-occupied territory on the Golan Heights.

With heavy losses of both men and matériel (an estimated four hundred tanks on the Suez front alone), Israeli forces managed first to stabilize both fronts in three days of heavy fighting.[24] On October 11, Israeli forces crossed the 1967 cease-fire line into Syria proper. Jordanian and Iraqi forces advanced to support Syria (though Jordan conspicuously did not seek to reopen fighting along its own cease-fire line with Israel on the Jordan River), but against resurgent Israeli air and ground power they accomplished little. Eager to demonstrate their continuing military superiority, Israeli forces pushed through Syrian defenses to within twenty miles of Damascus even as Israeli planes struck at a variety of targets deep inside Syria. Having advanced significantly beyond the 1967 lines, Israeli forces halted and, although exchanges of fire would continue into December, once Syria accepted a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution on October 22, the war in the north was essentially over.[25]

Events in the Sinai followed a similar pattern. After stabilizing the situation on the east bank of the Canal, Israeli forces crossed the canal on October 15 and established an Israeli bridgehead on the west bank. The U.N. cease-fire was slow to take hold on this southern front as well, with sporadic fighting continuing through January 1974. Embattled Egyptian forces held on to a strip of territory on the east bank of the Canal, while on the west bank the Israelis had reached positions just thirty miles from Cairo.[26] Palestinian and Kuwaiti military units had fought with the Egyptian armies, but like the Jordanian and Iraqi interventions in the north, their participation had more political than military significance.[27]

The events on the battlefields of the October War were dramatic enough, but politics and diplomacy had as much to do with the war’s outcome as events on the ground, and the consequences of the war for American foreign policy were much more important than the relatively modest, limited, and ultimately ephemeral territorial changes brought about in the fighting. Soviet influence and prestige suffered blows from which they never recovered. Egypt moved decisively from Nasser’s pan-Arabism to Sadat’s Egypt First policy. The United States came out of the fighting more deeply and publicly aligned with both Israel and Egypt than ever before and established as the arbiter of the Middle East.

For Egypt also, the war was a strategic success. Anwar Sadat’s victory, however limited and partial, was solid enough to silence his critics. The United States would now engage directly with Israel to negotiate successive withdrawals from occupied Egyptian territory. The Suez Canal would reopen in 1975. In 1979 Sadat would secure the return of every inch of occupied Egyptian territory—as of the time of writing, an accomplishment that neither Jordan nor Syria can match.

The idea that a reluctant Sadat was only lured into supporting Israel by an American “peace bribe” represents a fusion of Vulcanist and orientalist reasoning. In this view, agency is something that westerners and Jews have; Arabs, operating on passion alone, hate Israel with a pure and fiery hatred. They do not reason, they do not calculate, they do not develop visions of their political and national interests that lead to any stance short of blind and eternal enmity toward the Zionist interlopers in their midst.

This was not the thinking behind the 2020 Abraham Accords; it was not how Anwar Sadat’s mind worked. Far from being pushed into his peace policy by American pressure and “bribes,” Sadat was committed enough to his approach to wreck Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Middle East policy to reach his goal.

Jimmy Carter had his foreign policy victories in the White House—like the negotiation and ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty that returned control of the Canal to Panama—but the Middle East did not bring him success. In 1978, Carter drew back from the Nixon-era policy of promoting a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace. Carter wanted a general peace that would lead to an Israeli withdrawal not only from the Sinai, but also from the Golan Heights and the West Bank. To this end, he sought to convene a peace conference of all the interested countries and, in pursuit of a better relationship with Moscow, he invited the Soviets to attend.

Sadat understood that this approach would torpedo his foreign policy, giving the Syrians, Palestinians, and Soviets a veto over the return of Egyptian territory. The single most dramatic act of diplomacy in the history of the modern Middle East, Sadat’s flight to Jerusalem and address to the Knesset, was Sadat’s riposte.

It worked, as the Israelis shared Sadat’s visceral opposition to the Carter agenda. The Israelis and the Egyptians moved forward on their peace agenda despite Carter’s skepticism, and in the end, Carter was forced to abandon his own approach and jump on Sadat’s bandwagon. Far from being bribed by the Americans to make peace with Israel, the Egyptians forced the Americans to get out of the way so that they could conclude the deal.

To return to 1973, the October War could not have come at a worse time for the Nixon administration. On September 11, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende in a bloody coup that initiated a savage wave of repression against the Chilean left—with many then and later suspecting the United States of direct involvement in the coup. On October 5, Vice President Spiro Agnew decided to enter plea bargaining over allegations of corrupt behavior dating from his years in Maryland government. On October 9, as the military crisis in the Middle East was at its height, Agnew met with Richard Nixon to announce that he had decided to plead guilty and to resign.[28]

Simultaneously, the Watergate investigation was undermining Nixon’s own position. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled on October 12 that Nixon had to turn over potentially incriminating tapes to the Federal District Court. On Wednesday, October 17, OPEC announced an oil boycott of the United States because of its support for Israel in the war.[29] That Saturday night witnessed the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and the firestorm ignited by these events led to the start of the impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives. Nixon’s political fortunes would never recover.

Despite these distractions, the United States was heavily involved in all the stages of the war. When worried Israelis contacted the United States with information that another war might be imminent, the Americans were as we’ve seen unambiguous in their response: Israel could not again do what it did in 1967 and launch a preemptive strike. Kissinger was crystal clear with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: if Israel launched a war, the United States would feel no obligation to come to its aid.

As the news of Syrian and Egyptian successes came in from the battlefields on October 8 and 9, Israeli leaders worried about the sustainability of their position. Military equipment and supplies were being consumed at an unsustainable rate. On October 8 air force commander General Benny Peled warned that Israeli airpower would be exhausted in a week without resupply. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan warned that the time had come to prepare Israel’s nuclear weapons and, in what was likely a signal to the United States, Israeli missiles were prepared for launch.[30] On October 9 Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz warned Kissinger that Israel might lose the war.[31]

As Israel stabilized the battlefronts and prepared counteroffensives, the question of supply still dominated the bilateral U.S.-Israeli conversation. The battlefield progress was consuming Israeli ammunition and equipment at a ferocious pace. Golda Meir wanted to fly to the United States to ask for supplies in person. That plea was rejected, but the pressure on the United States to act was rising.[32]

It was not always clear who could speak for the United States. On October 11, when 10 Downing Street called to set up an urgent call about the Middle East situation between Prime Minister Edward Heath and President Nixon, Kissinger asked his deputy Brent Scowcroft whether the call could be postponed. “Can we tell them no?” Kissinger asked. “When I talked to the president he was loaded.”[33]

Meanwhile the war in the Middle East was threatening to draw in the superpowers. The Soviet Union, seizing an opportunity to rebuild ties with Egypt and to consolidate its role in the Middle East, launched a major airlift of military supplies to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq on October 9. Soviet technicians and military advisors were working closely with the Syrian military, and Soviet warships were authorized to fire on Israeli ships and planes approaching Soviet vessels and convoys.[34]

Confronted with a Soviet airlift, Washington decided on October 13 to launch a full-scale airlift of its own. A victory for the Soviet Union and its clients in the critical Middle East was unacceptable. The superpower crisis deepened dramatically on October 24 when, as a U.N.-brokered cease-fire appeared to be breaking down, American sensors detected nuclear weapons on Soviet ships passing through the Dardanelles from the Black Sea toward the Mediterranean. The House of Representatives had announced the beginning of impeachment proceedings against Nixon earlier that day; Nixon had gone to sleep following another heavy night of drinking as his top aides debated the American response. The decision was taken to raise the American global nuclear alert level to DEFCON III, one step below warning that nuclear war was imminent. The 82nd Airborne was placed on alert, three warships were dispatched to the combat theater, and seventy-five nuclear bombers were recalled from Guam to be available for action in the European and Middle East theaters.[35]

It was a very unpromising start, but the war ended by creating a series of opportunities that American diplomacy would go on to exploit. In the first place, thanks in part to strong American pressure to force Israel to terminate its counteroffensive while Egypt still held some Sinai territory on the east bank of the canal and without destroying the Egyptian military units in place there, Sadat could claim a victory against Israel. The prestige of that victory would enable him to go further to liquidate the Nasser legacy and won him support for the difficult decisions ahead. In the second place, with the Soviets discredited by the failure of their clients and of their resupply efforts, the United States emerged as the dominant superpower in the region, enjoying a unique and privileged position as the one power that could promote the diplomatic processes through which both Arabs and Israelis could reach their objectives. The Egyptians knew that their hopes of Israeli disengagement and withdrawal from Sinai depended on America’s willingness and ability to broker agreements between Jerusalem and Cairo. The Syrians, now desperate to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal from its advanced positions on the outskirts of Damascus, similarly understood that their longtime Soviet patron was worse than useless to them.

Over the next three years until Jimmy Carter’s victory over Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, brought an end to Kissinger’s time in government, Kissinger would engage in what became known as “shuttle diplomacy,” brokering disengagement and withdrawal agreements between Arabs and Israelis that calmed the region while securing, first, an end to the oil embargo and, second, a deepening of American ties with both sides. A special American relationship with Israel facilitated both the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the Middle East and the establishment of much closer relations between the United States and the Arab world.

Selling Arms

As is often the case in American foreign policy, it was more difficult for Nixon and his successors to win domestic support for their foreign policy initiatives than to hammer out agreements with foreign leaders. There were excellent foreign policy reasons for building deeper relations with the Arab world following the rise of OPEC. But this was a policy that many Americans loathed in the early 1970s.

Americans have always hated monopolists who abuse their power to overcharge customers. The Arab role in jacking up the world oil price struck many Americans as an exercise in unadulterated and unjustifiable greed. The Arab countries and, by extension, the Islamic world became associated in many American minds with treachery. This image would be reinforced many times over in subsequent years and would help shape the public response to the attacks of 9/11 and many other events. Americans may not be given to massive demonstrations and flag burnings to show their dislike of foreign countries, but from the 1970s forward both the Arabs, and then the Iranians after the fall of the Shah, entered the American imagination as villains.

The energy crisis helped to drive a revival of populist nationalism in 1970s America. These populists, often middle- and lower-middle-class working people whose tight budgets did not leave much room for price increases and whose lifestyles depended heavily on the automobile, were seriously affected by the oil price hikes. Explicitly tying their embargo to U.S. policy on Israel, OPEC countries looked like a cabal of unprincipled and cowardly blackmailers. Unable to beat the Israelis on the battlefield, the sneaky Arabs were now trying to use underhanded economic methods to undermine a brave little country and to cow the United States. One can argue whether this view of the case was entirely fair to the Arabs, but that was hardly the point politically. To most Americans, the Gulf states were backward (Saudi Arabia and North Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962; Oman abolished it in 1970),[36] bigoted (banning or persecuting non-Muslim religions), and dictatorial with little or no concern for human rights. American policies aimed at appeasing OPEC infuriated millions of Americans who felt the consequences of the oil shock at the gas pump, in their utility bills, in the inflation that increasingly dogged the American economy in these years, and in the job losses and wage stagnation as high oil prices took their toll. The hours Americans spent waiting in line to buy overpriced gas provided ample opportunities to reflect on just how they felt about the oil sheikhs.

Populist nationalists (or Jacksonians) were enraged by Arab actions and were dismayed by any signs of pusillanimous complaisance whether from business, Washington policymakers, or European allies. Standing up to Arab blackmail became a moral test for Jacksonian America. Politicians seen as knuckling under to the Arabs or trying to appease them were considered cowards. When the Iranians seized the American embassy and took diplomats hostage, the earlier fury at the oil price rises exploded into a bonfire of rage. More than anything else, President Carter’s failure to handle the consequences of the energy shocks and the Iran hostage crisis to the satisfaction of Jacksonian America led to the election of Ronald Reagan and a dramatic new turn in American foreign policy.

Washington policymakers could not indulge in such rage. Ensuring that the huge dollar surpluses accumulated by OPEC states were handled in ways that supported rather than eroded the U.S.-led financial system was a vital American interest. This involved persuading the oil sheikhs to recycle their petrodollar surpluses through a still-shaky post–Bretton Woods global financial system, to purchase enough American-made goods and services to limit the damage of the growing oil import bills to the American balance of payments deficit—a central preoccupation of economic policymakers in these years—and to invest their new wealth in American securities and companies. On the security side, at a time when the United States was attempting to reduce its global defense responsibilities, Washington needed to ensure that the Persian Gulf remained open to commerce and that neither the USSR nor any hostile regional state acquired the ability to shut off the flow of oil to world, and American, markets.

Promoting American exports to the newly rich Gulf states became a high priority at a time when financial experts saw trade deficits as dangerously destabilizing. The export drive took strange turns and a gold rush atmosphere developed as Americans flocked to the Gulf. Much of the new Gulf wealth disappeared into a world populated by corrupt officials, shady con artists, embezzlers, and Ponzi schemes. The Arabs had more money than they knew what to do with; America teemed with consultants ready and willing to help them solve this terrible problem.

It quickly became evident that arms sales, already a growing business, would be a major component of the new relationship between the oil-rich Gulf states and the United States. Arms sales allowed Americans to court the traditional Arab monarchies and increase the collective defense capacities of America’s alliance system, while also ensuring that the Gulf petrostates poured billions of dollars back into the U.S. A steady, large-scale flow of advanced American weapons would deter the Soviets, assure the Arabs that the United States was committed to their defense, alleviate American balance of payment problems, and cement ties between the American and Gulf militaries.

Selling vast quantities of arms to the oil-rich Arabs was an obvious and appealing solution to many of America’s strategic worries in the Middle East at a time when not many alternative policies could be found. But the policy had its opponents both in the United States and abroad. At home, it wasn’t just that selling arms to hated Arab despots was distasteful to American public opinion. Most of the governments that the United States wanted to arm—Egypt and the Gulf monarchies, the Shah—were exactly the kind of corrupt and dictatorial regimes that American public opinion had wearied of supporting. Tens of thousands of Americans died in Vietnam to defend a military dictatorship and its political cronies, and $839 billion had disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam.[37] Now the Nixon administration and its heirs would have to call for more American support for the oil sheikhs and dictators of the Middle East.

And there was Israel. At a time when Americans were seething with rage at Arab oil policies, selling Arab states enough weapons to attack Israel was a policy that no American Congress would accept. American public opinion was not going to tolerate a policy that weakened Israel’s ability to defend itself against the newly rich Arabs. Arms sales needed congressional approval; that approval would not be forthcoming if the sales undermined Israel’s security.

But concern about Israel’s attitude toward wholesale weapons sales to the Arabs was not just about the sentiments of American voters. The oil shock was not just an economic shock to western consumers; it was a geopolitical shock to Israel. Suddenly the Arab world was awash in cash. While Israel’s relationships with the more conservative Gulf sheikhdoms had never been as bad as those with the radical Arab states, there could be no denying the reality that hundreds of billions of dollars in new Arab oil wealth would have political and military consequences. Countries including France and Britain, less important in the Middle East than they used to be, still had deep ties with the Arab world. Those countries would be even more eager than the United States to sell arms into the Gulf and win investments and business partnerships from it. How might that change their political attitudes toward Israel, and what weapons would they be willing to sell to Arab states for both financial and political reasons? Beyond that, the United States wanted to ensure that American firms got the lion’s share of the contracts and opportunities opening up in the oil states. While British and French and others’ arms companies could compete with the United States on individual weapons systems, overall the American defense industry offered the widest selection of technologically advanced weapons.[38] If the United States wanted to secure the high ground in the competition for influence among western powers, it would need to offer weapons in quantities and at a level of quality that would relegate European competitors to the second tier.

But the prospect of large weapons sales to the Arab world could set off a regional war. The Israelis prepared to strike Egypt after the Czech arms sale of 1955 threatened to tip the military balance. Would they now sit patiently with their hands folded as foreign weapons streamed into the Middle East, potentially giving Arab countries the edge they needed to attack Israel again?

The answer seemed obvious: the way to stop Israel from fighting a preemptive war was to ensure that arms sales to the Arabs did not worsen Israel’s military position. The United States would have to arm Israel. This approach might seem cynical, with the United States pushing an arms race on both Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East, but at a time of a balance of payments crisis and job-destroying recessions, most American policymakers were willing to overlook such concerns. There was, however, a problem. Israel, while no longer living the hand-to-mouth life of its early years, did not have large deposits of oil with which to pay multibillion-dollar arms import bills every year. If the United States planned a vast expansion of weapons sales to the Arab world, Israel would be saddled with crippling debts if it tried to match the purchases that the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and others might choose to make. Making matters worse, Israel would not just need to match Saudi Arabia or Kuwait dollar for dollar to maintain the military balance. Israel would need to acquire enough weapons to offset the combined purchases of the Arab states.

Forcing Israel to choose between bankrupting itself in an arms race and launching a preemptive war to protect itself against a looming Arab superiority in conventional weapons was an unsustainable policy in the American Congress, and it could only lead to disaster in the Middle East. This was a fact whose implications were not lost on American arms manufacturers, worried about finding new markets to fill up their order books with the end of the Vietnam War reducing the Pentagon’s weapons purchases.

The implications were clear if paradoxical: if the United States wanted to sell more weapons to the Arab nations, it would have to deepen its relationship with Israel.

In 1979, both Egypt and Israel became still more important when the Shah of Iran, America’s key regional ally, fell from power and the Islamic Republic was born. Long the greatest beneficiary of American aid in the region, Iran now became Washington’s most implacable regional enemy. Relations deteriorated through 1979 until radical Iranian students seized sixty-six American diplomats and other personnel in the American embassy in November.[39] Iran had been the cornerstone of American efforts to keep the Soviet Union from establishing itself in the region. Now, that bulwark gone, the Gulf monarchies were horrified and American regional strategy was left in a state of near-total disarray. To make matters worse, the Soviets invaded neighboring Afghanistan, the first direct intervention by the USSR outside of its Warsaw Pact sphere of influence since the 1940s.[40]

Israel now emerged as Iran’s replacement in American strategic thinking, and the effect of this shift on American aid levels to Israel was momentous. In 1965, Israel had received $391 million, compared to $645 million for Iran and $619 million for Egypt. In 1979, after Israel signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt, Israel received $14.1 billion in aid, and it received on average more than $5.5 billion annually for the next decade.[41] The United States was not only helping Israel match the arms buildup in the Gulf, but it was also supporting the Israeli military to balance the new threat of Iran. Alignment was turning into alliance.

The fall of the Shah and the rise of Ronald Reagan to the presidency on a tide of Jacksonian sentiment cemented the new arrangement. There were still quarrels, as when the increasingly visible pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) led an all-out effort to stop the sale of advanced AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia.[42] That attempt failed and did not disrupt the tacit alliance linking Israel, the Gulf Arabs, oil companies, arms sales companies, the Pentagon, the State Department, and pro-Israel Americans in support of a pattern of diplomatic, military, and economic ties among them.

The closest the understanding behind this long-standing policy has come to a formal expression is the concept known as QME, or qualitative military edge. Under this doctrine the United States ensures that Israel will always have the capabilities to deter and defeat hostile neighbors in conventional military battle. Reagan, who increased American annual aid to Israel to the $3 billion level (over $7 billion in 2019 dollars), was the first U.S. president to endorse QME publicly.[43] It has been U.S. policy since the 1980s and was enshrined into law by large bipartisan majorities in the Democrat-controlled Congress of 2008.[44]

QME has lasted this long because it benefits so many parties. The Israelis, of course, gain an important guarantee for their security as well as long-term institutional links with American arms and tech companies. The conservative Arab states, who do not fear attacks from Israel but who worry about other warlike states in the region, have long understood that Israeli strength helps secure their own independence. The arrangement also ensures that Arab states get access to very large quantities of extremely good American weapons, and whenever the Israelis get access to a new U.S. weapons system, the Arabs can upgrade their own arsenals to the next highest level.

For American arms manufacturers and the Pentagon, it is difficult to think of a better arrangement. American arms companies have large export markets, helping them to generate the research and development funding that preserves America’s technological advantages. Even long-suffering American taxpayers benefit as the costs of development of new weapons systems get spread over more units, helping to control the costs that the Pentagon pays for its own arms supplies and helping to preserve the technological edge on which American security ultimately depends.

One can debate the wisdom of steadily shipping arms of growing sophistication and power to a very unstable part of the world, and one can debate the morality of arming nondemocratic governments and their security services to the teeth, but from a realist perspective the American policy of large arms sales to the oil-producing countries along with the aid necessary to help Israel maintain its QME has, since the 1970s, served on balance to reduce tensions between the countries of the region and to draw key countries closer to the United States even as their influence in world affairs increased. The development of America’s special relationship with Israel enabled the special relationship with the Arab oil producers without which the American political, economic, and foreign policy revival from the crisis of the early 1970s could not have taken place.

The formative years of the special relationship also witnessed the rise of some of the basic elements of the American political landscape around the Israel alliance. The 1970s and early 1980s saw the transformation of AIPAC into a significant Washington presence, the rise of Jacksonian and evangelical Zionism, and the establishment of a strong bipartisan coalition in support of the alliance. Before the 1973 war, AIPAC had one lobbyist on its staff; by 1981, its budget had increased sixfold and it had a team of specialists working the halls of Congress.[45] AIPAC’s strength was not the cause of the new relationship. Neither President Nixon nor Secretary of State Kissinger made the key decisions of October 1973 with AIPAC or any other lobbying group in mind. Those decisions were driven by their perception of American interests in the most dangerous superpower crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis eleven years earlier. Given the broad public sympathy for Israel and the intense public antipathy toward the Arab oil producers, AIPAC’s reputation as a defender of Israeli interests could be, and was, used by presidents more to neutralize opposition to arms sales to the Arabs. Just as the relationship with Israel enabled rather than disrupted the American relationship with the Arabs, the presence of AIPAC in the political and policy process facilitated rather than distorted or hindered the construction of the new framework for the promotion of American interests in the Middle East.

Like many other partnerships the U.S. formed during the Cold War, the relationships that the United States forged in the Middle East during and after the 1973 war proved durable, outliving the Soviet Union. From the beginning, these relationships with Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf monarchies, have been controversial in American politics. Whether because of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, Saudi support for radical Islamism, or the repressive nature of Egyptian governance, significant sectors of American public opinion have repeatedly criticized all of these partnerships. They still do, but the relationships, tested and frayed, remain important factors in Middle East policies half a century later.

Over time, all three sides profited substantially from the relationship. Egypt recovered all the territory lost in 1967 and benefited from close and supportive relations with the United States. The Gulf Arabs enjoyed American protection, most spectacularly during the 1991 Gulf War when the United States led a global coalition to roll back Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. And as for the United States, between the benefits of expelling the Soviet Union and those of becoming the paramount power in the Middle East at the time when the region’s oil resources made it the central factor in global economics, it benefited most of all.

For some Vulcanists, the question of why the oil companies failed to stop the development of the U.S.-Israel entente remains perplexing. Oil, after all, had become the most important substance in the world, and Arab goodwill was key to obtaining it. That the United States paid the price of an oil embargo for its support of Israel in the 1973 war was bad enough; that it would repeatedly test the limits of Arab tolerance by continuing to support the Jewish state for decades to come seemed clear evidence of Planet Vulcan’s power.

Oil executives and politicians who were close to them—like the Bush family and other members of the Republican establishment—did promote close relations with the Arab world and realized that too close or too public an American embrace of Israel could cause problems in the Middle East. These tensions often erupted into policy battles between “pro-Arab” and “pro-Israel” officials and policymakers both inside and outside of government. However, in part because they understood the complex but compelling logic behind the American approach to both sides embedded in Kissingerian diplomacy, and in part because the nature of the relationship of American oil companies to Arab governments had changed since the 1950s, their concerns were more nuanced than many outsiders understood.

In the 1940s and 1950s, American oil companies enjoyed a set of privileges in Arab oil-producing countries that they very much wanted to maintain. The contracts between foreign oil companies and national governments reflected the unequal bargaining power of multinational, western-backed oil companies and weak, inexperienced governments in the Middle East. The oil companies ran their businesses as they liked, were fully in control of pricing and production decisions, and received the lion’s share of the profits.

The connection between an “Arabist” position on Israel and the desire to maintain control over Arab oil resources had a long history behind it. The so-called pro-Arab British diplomats who opposed the Zionists in the 1940s were as we’ve seen far less interested in the Palestinian cause than in preserving British power in the region. Many British officials in the area developed a genuine love of Arab culture and sympathy with the Arab people, but hardheaded calculations of the national interest, like Attlee’s belief that control over Arab oil was necessary to fund the rise in living standards of the British working class that Labour had been elected to achieve, were what drove British policy.

The American relationship with the Arab world had never been quite this controlling, but the colonial origins of the economic relationship between oil-producing countries and western oil companies shaped an economic relationship of profound and unequal benefit to the companies. Such a one-sided relationship is rarely secure, and both diplomats and corporate executives feared that the slightest outbreak of anti-Americanism or nationalism in oil-producing countries could result in the termination of their privileged arrangements.

The rise of OPEC was part of a process through which these quasi-colonial arrangements gave way to arrangements that put host governments in the driver’s seat. Between 1971, when Algeria nationalized its (French-owned) oil industry,[46] and 1980, when Saudi Arabia bought out the remaining privately held foreign share of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco),[47] the economic relationship between the Arab states and foreign investors was revolutionized. Under the new conditions, Middle Eastern operations became less profitable for the oil majors, but also less fraught.[48] American companies needed less help from diplomats to defend their interests and the Arab governments were less inclined to let politics interfere with a relationship that paid handsomely in both security and economic terms.

It was still in the interest of the oil companies for the United States to maintain good relations with Arab oil producers, but from an oil company point of view the world was becoming flatter. There were no super profits to protect in the Arab world, and while access to Arab production, and operating agreements with nationalized oil companies, provided a steady stream of both product and income, a barrel of Saudi or Kuwaiti oil was no longer more valuable to an American oil company than a barrel produced elsewhere. Indeed, the price shocks of the 1970s led to a new boom in exploration around the world. Mobilizing American technology to exploit offshore resources or to prospect for new oilfields in more welcoming countries might produce less oil but more profit for American firms while reducing their dependence on special political relationships with Arab rulers.

The “Arabist” case in Washington was less urgently seconded by oil executives fearful that Washington missteps on Israel would cost them billions in nationalized assets. Oil companies, banks, arms manufacturers, and other corporate interests who wanted access to the immense wealth flooding into the Arab world in the 1970s continued to press for pro-Arab policies, but because mutual benefit played a greater role in these relationships, business advocacy was more measured and its position more flexible. Ultimately, the new American posture in the Middle East was consensual. Oil companies, AIPAC and its allies, and the Israeli and Arab governments might try to push at the edges of the consensus, but the overall framework of American policy was one that all interested parties, and American public opinion at large, could accept.

Solomon’s Temple

Thanks in substantial part to its successes in the Middle East, Kissingerian diplomacy during the Nixon-Ford years had stopped the disintegration of the American world position and begun the work of recovery. But in the view of many Americans in both parties, the work of reconstruction was not yet done. The abandonment of principled anticommunism, and behind that the national commitment to human rights and a transformative global agenda, did not sit well.

In the minds of many Americans, the United States remained a providential nation. The ideals of the liberal enlightenment were not merely ethical aspirations; they were part of the glue that held a diverse society together, and without some kind of adherence to these popular ideals the American government was felt to be lacking an essential element of political legitimacy.

The competition with the Soviet Union had never been, these Americans felt, just a soulless battle for power, a clash of imperial ambitions like the wars of the Assyrians against Babylon. The Cold War was a continuation of the American mission to stand for something positive in the world and to share the precious legacy of freedom with peoples all over the earth.

Paradoxically, the success of Nixonian diplomacy on the ground led to increased dissatisfaction with its apparently amoral or even immoral approach to world politics. Shell-shocked by multiple crises at home and abroad, Americans in the early 1970s seemed ready to accept the various moral and political sacrifices Nixonian policy entailed. But as the crisis faded and feelings of normalcy returned, the mood of the country changed.

A cynic might say that Americans did not just want foreign policies that worked. They also wanted foreign policies that made them feel good about themselves. Others would say that Americans wanted foreign policies that addressed their values as well as their interests. In any case, a growing hunger for a return to a more ideological, values-driven foreign policy made itself felt on both the right and the left. The right, represented by conservative Republicans like Ronald Reagan, wanted a return to anticommunism as a moral anchor for American policy. On the left, liberal Democrats including Jimmy Carter wanted the United States to bring a concern for human rights into the center of policymaking.

In the Hebrew scriptures we read that the national hero King David wanted to complete his reign by building a temple for God in Jerusalem. But this was not to be. God told David, “Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood.” The glory of building the Temple would be reserved for a successor whose hands were clean.

The reconstruction of the holy temple of human rights in American foreign policy would similarly be reserved for Nixon’s successors. Under Gerald Ford, aides Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together to reduce Kissinger’s policy influence and return the U.S. to a more hostile posture toward the USSR. President Jimmy Carter sought to put human rights at the center of policymaking, but the fall of the Shah and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan frustrated his attempts to set American foreign policy on a new direction. The task of temple building ultimately fell to Ronald Reagan, whose administration incorporated a tough anti-Soviet stance with a human rights posture that brought great pressure to bear on the South African apartheid regime and helped promote democratic transitions among American allies like South Korea and the Philippines. Far from weakening American foreign policy, the incorporation of human rights and principled anticommunism in the 1980s would contribute significantly to the processes which destroyed the appeal of Soviet ideology in much of the world, weakened the Soviet hold on its European satellite states, and ultimately undermined Soviet ideology at home.

The story of the “refuseniks,” Jews whose application for exit visas were rejected by Soviet authorities, played a significant role in the creation and implementation of a post-Nixonian foreign policy in the United States. In 1974 both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to incorporate the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in the U.S. Trade Act of that year; the amendment restricted American trade with nonmarket economies that limited the right of Jews to emigrate. This amendment, which seriously disrupted the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union and would bedevil U.S.-Soviet relations for many years, was widely seen as yet another example of occult Jewish power in the United States. Israel would clearly be a chief beneficiary of any flow of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union, so only Jewish power could explain why the United States would antagonize a nuclear superpower, anger the Arabs (who had been opposing Jewish immigration since the time of the Balfour Declaration), and forgo profitable trade deals to make life easier for the Jewish state.

The story of Jews under Soviet rule is a complex one. The antisemitism of imperial Russian policy under Alexander III and Nicholas II had embittered Jews in Russia and around the world and, as we’ve seen, led to mass Jewish migration from the Russian Empire, primarily though not exclusively into the United States. At a time when American Jews possessed very little political or economic power in the United States, American indignation at barbarous and violent Russian antisemitism culminated in the abrogation of a Russian-American trade agreement[49]—an early example of civil society pressure leading the American government to impose economic sanctions on a foreign government. Brutal pogroms and official antisemitism were among the reasons why so many Americans welcomed the February Revolution that overthrew Nicholas II in 1917 and contributed to the sympathy with which many initially regarded the Bolshevik Revolution later that year.

In its initial stages the Soviet government appeared to offer some sympathy to local Jews. Soviet nationality policy encouraged the cultural life of minorities, and the secular, scientific orientation of the new government offered many Jews more opportunity and better education than the old regime. One must never forget that with all its faults, the Soviet government protected its Jewish citizens to the best of its abilities against Nazi invaders during the 1941–45 war and it was Soviet forces who liberated the extermination camps where the mass of the killing of European Jews took place.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was no utopia for the Jews. Religious Jews faced the same repression that the officially atheist regime turned against all forms of belief and organization that challenged however indirectly the totalitarian demands of the Soviet state. Under Stalin, Jewish communists were targeted for repression and murder precisely because of their links to once revered Bolshevik heroes like Leon Trotsky. The popular antisemitism that was such an engrained feature of life in the pre-Soviet Russian Empire did not disappear with the Revolution, and over time gradually made itself felt in the Communist Party.

Stalin’s brief but consequential honeymoon with Israel filled Soviet Jews with excitement, but their enthusiasm for Ben-Gurion’s new state contributed to communist doubts about Jewish loyalty. In the last months of his life, Stalin appeared to be planning a major new purge that would have hit “rootless cosmopolites” particularly hard. Saved by Stalin’s death and the following thaws in the climate of Soviet repression, Jews like many other Soviet citizens enjoyed more breathing space during Nikita Khrushchev’s time in power. In the Brezhnev years, however, Jews were once again targeted and their opportunities for education and advancement were sharply restricted. A nationalities quota system had the impact of reducing Jewish student enrollment in Moscow (where the best and most prestigious Soviet schools were located) by 50 percent. Jewish scientists faced targeted discrimination. Emigration from a stagnant, repressive, antireligious, and antisemitic society looked attractive to growing numbers of Soviet Jews.

The modern era of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union began when Premier Alexei Kosygin issued a statement in 1966 saying that Soviet citizens would be permitted to emigrate in cases where this would facilitate family reunions. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War encouraged Jews to seek permission to emigrate; 2,000 permits were issued in 1969, and Soviet Jews began to organize around the issue and seek permits in much larger numbers. Thirteen thousand would be allowed to leave in 1971. During the American debate over ratification of the SALT I treaty and the peak of détente, 31,000 Jews received exit visas. Soviet authorities retaliated against what they saw as the unacceptable interference of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment by cracking down severely on emigration. A second wave of emigration peaked with 51,000 permits in 1979, but it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union that the floodgates opened, with roughly one million post-Soviet immigrants reaching Israel, not all of them halachically Jewish.[50]

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, many more Jews (and members of other ethnic minorities like the Volga Germans) petitioned for exit visas than received them. Those whose petitions were denied, either because a ceiling limited the overall number of exit visas permitted at a particular time, because authorities believed that a particular individual had knowledge too valuable or too sensitive to be permitted to leave, or because local officials arbitrarily chose to deny the request, became known as refuseniks. They, and those whose requests had been accepted but were waiting for their turn to leave, were regarded as enemies and traitors by many officials and faced retaliation of many kinds. The refuseniks, often fighting intense government repression, organized, wrote petitions, and sought to attract international attention to their plight.

In past generations, the victims of Soviet oppression had often failed to attract significant sympathy or help in the West. In part this was due to the romantic notions many westerners, especially but not only on the political left, cherished about the Soviet Union. Communism enjoyed an intellectual vogue in much of the West when, during the Depression, capitalism appeared to be failing. While Stalin’s agreement to partition Poland with Hitler in 1939 disillusioned many, the heroism of the Red Army during World War II and the prominent role that communists played in the various European resistance movements during the war helped restore the mystique. Episodes like the suppression of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring furthered the process of disillusionment, however, and by the 1970s there was little sympathy for the repressive, sclerotic, and bureaucratic Soviet communist model among serious Western observers.

For American Democrats, reeling from George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972 and still scarred by the catastrophic failure of Kennedy-Johnson foreign policy in Vietnam, the plight of the refuseniks was a heaven-sent opportunity to unite the party while attacking Nixon’s alleged soft line toward the Soviet Union. For conservative Republicans, the refusenik cause was a banner that could rally the party’s anticommunist base against what, to hardliners, appeared to be Nixon’s sellout of anticommunist principle.

It was in vain that Kissinger and his allies warned that Jackson-Vanik would derail détente and lead to reductions in the number of exit visas awarded to Soviet Jews. Liberal Democrats believed Kissinger was as wrong about this as, in their view, he was wrong about so much else. Conservative Republicans thought he was correct, but since their goal was to use Jackson-Vanik to derail détente they pressed ahead regardless.

In the end, while the Jackson-Vanik Amendment frustrated advocates of Kissingerian détente by reinserting an unfinessable human rights component into the bilateral relationship with the Soviet Union and, as Kissinger warned, slowed the rate of Jewish emigration from the USSR, its ultimate effect on American foreign policy was to strengthen the hands of Washington policymakers. The perception that the United States stood for something might have been a luxury that Washington could not afford in 1970, but a recovering America needed to regain the moral high ground. Embracing the cause of the refuseniks as part of a broader human rights strategy primarily directed at undermining the legitimacy of communist rule in Europe was one of the ways Americans signaled the growing revival of American strength and purpose that marked the recovery from the crisis of the early 1970s.

The revival of American self-confidence and the return of ideology to American foreign policy associated with the pro-refusenik movement was not an unmitigated good in subsequent years. As we shall see, with the end of the Cold War, ideological overconfidence would lead the United States into a series of unsustainable and unrealistic expectations and commitments.

In American foreign policy debates, realists and idealists both like to see themselves as expressing radically different worldviews. Realists scoff that idealists are naive; idealists despise realists as moral defectives too stupid to grasp the many ways in which ideas and values ultimately drive history. The history of the 1970s suggests that the relationship between the two approaches can be symbiotic. Without the success of Kissingerian realpolitik in the 1970s the return of ideology and human rights that characterized the Carter and Reagan years—and that metastasized into fantasies of liberal world order building after the Soviet collapse—might never have occurred. Without a firm grounding in realpolitik, the idealism of the Carter years, and the grand projects of the post–Cold War era, were doomed to fail.

The art of American statecraft lies less in choosing between idealism and realism than in judiciously blending them together.