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The October 1973 Middle East War transformed the region’s
politics and had a huge impact on the international political
system as a whole. Arguments about the causes, effects, and meaning
of the war and about why it ran its course the way it did have
played a key role in shaping the understanding of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, of American policy in the Middle East, and of many other
major issues. For the 50th anniversary of the war, this book
grapples with these issues in an objective way by using the mass of
declassified material that has recently become available.
In A Lost Peace, Galen Jackson rewrites an important chapter in the
history of the middle period of the Cold War, changing how we think
about the Arab-Israeli conflict. During the June 1967 Middle East
war, Israeli forces seized the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip
from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and
East Jerusalem from Jordan. This conflict was followed, in October
1973, by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel, which threatened
to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation
even though the superpowers had seemingly embraced the idea of
détente. This conflict contributed significantly to the ensuing
deterioration of US-Soviet relations. The standard explanation for
why détente failed is that the Soviet Union, driven mainly by its
Communist ideology, pursued a highly aggressive foreign policy
during the 1970s. In the Middle East specifically, the conventional
wisdom is that the Soviets played a destabilizing role by
encouraging the Arabs in their conflict with Israel in an effort to
undermine the US position in the region for Cold War gain. Jackson
challenges standard accounts of this period, demonstrating that the
United States sought to exploit the Soviet Union in the Middle
East, despite repeated entreaties from USSR leaders that the
superpowers cooperate to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli
settlement. By leveraging the remarkable evidence now available to
scholars, Jackson reveals that the United States and the Soviet
Union may have missed an opportunity for Middle East peace during
the 1970s.
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