The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973 by Craig Daigle (review)

In The Limits of Détente, a readable and at times dramatic study, Craig Daigle offers a complex perspective on the nuclear superpower era of détente, looking at both the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Arab-Israeli rivalry, especially the two fierce Middle East conflicts that took place over a four-year time span in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Daigle, a professor at City College of New York, draws particularly on U.S. State Department archival documents, as well as Russian, Arab, and Israeli memoirs, and concludes the 1969–1970 War of Attrition and the October 1973 War between Israeli and Arab armies resulted not only from tensions and competing interests among Middle East belligerents but also from policies adopted in both Washington and Moscow toward their clients. As the title indicates, détente as an effort at cooperative relationships and a new period of non-war in global affairs had a mixed, indeed limited, record of achievement. For the most part, the Arab-Israeli conflict caused problems for détente, and détente exacerbated Arab-Israeli tensions, with not much to show when the October 1973 war came to a close.

Relaxing strained superpower relations had antecedents before Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Leonid Brezhnev, and Andrei Gromyko took international center stage. Dwight Eisenhower had invited Nikita Khrushchev to Camp David and his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in an effort to lessen big-power tensions. John F. Kennedy, following the Cuban missile crisis, began negotiations with Moscow that led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Lyndon Johnson pursued arms control, mutual and balanced force reductions in Germany, scientific and cultural exchanges, and the liberalization of trade and travel restrictions between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact countries. He also hosted a major summit with Aleksei Kosygin at Glassboro State College in New Jersey to improve the prospects for a lasting peace with the Soviet Union. Attempting to relax European stresses and strains, Charles de Gaulle and Willy Brandt pursued semi-successful efforts at rapprochement with their East-bloc neighbors.

What placed Nixon, a well-known Cold Warrior, in a special category was his pursuit of détente as the centerpiece of his administration’s foreign policy. In early 1969, his national security adviser, Kissinger, conveyed to Moscow that Nixon would be seeking “an era of negotiations, not confrontation.” Building a stable world order despite “irrevocable antagonisms,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis has put it, would be the order of the day. Central to this new bilateralism was an effort to grapple with key lingering issues of limiting nuclear and conventional arms, finding ways to prevent nuclear warfare, concluding scientific and cultural agreements, opening up trade relations (something Soviet leaders desperately wanted), lowering tensions surrounding Berlin, and bringing the war in Indochina to an honorable end (something the U.S. administration desperately wanted).

In this mix was the powder keg of the post–June 1967 Middle East, a region that in Nixon’s view affected not just the local antagonists but the United States and the Soviet Union. Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Kissinger’s chief aide on the Soviet Union, wrote to his two bosses: “The US needed to remain in touch with the Soviets on the Middle East because it may be one . . . way of preventing renewed large-scale hostilities with potential for a direct US-Soviet military clash” and because the Soviet Union possessed “great influence” with Egypt, “the key to any tranquilization of Middle East tensions and dangers.” Less than two months after his swearing in, Nixon moved forward with what became known as the Two Power talks, believing this regional dispute could be solved only by the participation of the superpowers.

Surprisingly, Nixon chose Secretary of State William Rogers to lead the U.S. side in these bilateral deliberations. Daigle, in analyzing Rogers’s efforts to...