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91 The Yom Kippur War, 1973 Two crises in the final twenty years of the Cold War marked the continuation of conflicts within NATO that were manifested in the UN arena. Both of them involved the United States and the Soviet Union as central figures. Arguably the more bitter, if not the more significant, was the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in which the Soviet Union was a key partisan of the Arab cause, anxious to replace the United States in the Middle east and to stir up as much trouble as possible within the Atlantic alliance. It is noteworthy that NATO’s voice in the UN was silenced by the divisions between the United States and its european allies over the Middle east. essentially, dependence on oil, along with national interests in the Arab world and sympathy for the Arab cause, trumped considerations of aggression in October 1973. In all the proceedings the UN secretary-general played only a minor role. hobbled by a compromised past, Waldheim was in no position to attempt to exercise the kind of leadership hammarskjöld and even Lie had displayed in the UN’s first decade. A deeper political issue was at work within the alliance. Repressed resentments against U.S. hegemony had been loosened by the Vietnam War, and the IsraelArab conflict was an opportunity for the allies to vent their feelings. Although the NAC could not express these sentiments clearly, the european Community (eC), where the european NATO powers functioned outside U.S. scrutiny, could and did. europeans felt that Americans did not appreciate their dependence on secure access to Middle eastern oil. They were convinced that American leaders sacrificed their partners’ vital interests to the imperatives of domestic politics. America’s bias toward Israel then was responsible for the turmoil in the Middle east. There was little understanding of european sensibilities in the American reaction , which in essence saw the United States as being on the brink of confrontation with the Soviets just as the european allies were abandoning their senior partner. The Cold War had not ended, and the europeans recognized the continued need 5 The Afghanistan War, 1980 NATO and the UN / 92 for the alliance. But visceral fears of the Soviet bloc along with the respect for U.S. leadership had diminished to the point where the europeans could act more freely in challenging the senior ally. Background of the Soviet Invasion Six years later, another crisis in the Middle east confronted the United Nations when the Soviet Union in december 1979 dispatched troops to Afghanistan. This time it was one of the two superpowers, the Soviet Union, and not a surrogate nation that initiated the crisis. On one level conflict grew out of a bilateral arrangement between two communist powers. In fact, the regime that the Soviets supported as well as its predecessor were both in the communist orbit. But much of the noncommunist world including the Arab bloc and the United States saw the Soviet invasion as a repression of the Afghan people and a threat to international peace. The United States feared that the Soviets were using turmoil in Kabul as an excuse to move into the Persian Gulf, and into control of the oil resources of that region. NATO allies joined the majority of UN members in denouncing the Soviet intervention but, even more than in the Arab-Israel war, they distanced themselves from the meaning the United States gave to the Soviet invasion. There was no NATO voice in the UN deliberations. In fact, the european Community offered a clearer reaction than NATO to the crisis. Afghanistan itself had long been a prize contested in the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century between an expanding czarist Russia and an imperial Britain worried about the defense of India. In the Cold War this land-locked mountainous country of fiercely independent tribesmen had tried to balance the new players of the “game,” the Soviet Union and the United States, by accepting military aid from both sides after the departure of Britain from India in 1947. Obviously, the Soviets had a stronger interest in the neighboring state than the United States, whose interests centered on Iran and Pakistan. And accordingly, Afghan governments both before and after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1973 tried to accommodate the Soviets.1 The balancing act ended in 1978 when Marxist officers seized power in a violent coup with a pro-Moscow faction under Nur Mohammed Taraki assuming the...

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