Peter L. Hahn

America and the Middle East in the 1970s

Since the 1940s, the United States has confronted daunting challenges in the Middle East, a region rich in natural resources, rife with internal conflict, and resistant to external influences. Scholars seeking to analyze the accomplishments and shortcomings of U.S. diplomats have written dozens of primarysource research books on U.S. policy toward the decolonization of European empires after World War II, the emergence of new (or newly independent) states across the region, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the perceived Soviet menace to the region, and other complicated topics. The literature on the U.S. approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict has generally followed the phased declassification of U.S. government documents. Scholarly attention therefore has begun to concentrate on the 1970s, a decade marked by perpetual Arab-Israeli tensions and the dramatic war of October 1973 and shaped by President Richard Nixon’s quest to reform and revitalize U.S. diplomacy under the rubric of détente. In two books that are strikingly different in approach, sources, style, content, and conclusions, historians Craig Daigle and Gil Troy contribute unique and memorable interpretations of the American handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1970s. An associate professor of history at the City College of New York, Daigle develops a bold and compelling thesis with two distinct parts. First, he argues that the U.S.-Soviet détente launched during the Nixon Administration faltered largely because the two superpowers continued to compete for power and influence in the Middle East. Second, Daigle believes that the practice of détente at the global level aggravated Arab-Israeli tensions, hobbled efforts to promote an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, and actually contributed to the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Distinct from the tendency in the literature to