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H-Diplo Roundtable, Vol. XV, No. 6 2013 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane H-Diplo Labrosse Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii H-Diplo Roundtable Review www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Volume XV, No. 6 (2013) 7 October 2013 Introduction by Fred H. Lawson Jesse Ferris. Nasser’s Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780691155142 (cloth, $45.00/£30.95). Stable URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XV-6.pdf Contents Introduction by Fred H. Lawson, Mills College ......................................................................... 2 Review by J.E. Peterson, Tucson, Arizona ................................................................................. 4 Review by Yaacov Ro’i, Tel-Aviv University .............................................................................. 6 Review by Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara ............................................. 9 Author’s Response by Jesse Ferris, Israel Democracy Institute.............................................. 12 Copyright © 2013 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at [email protected]. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XV, No. 6 (2013) Introduction by Fred H. Lawson, Mills College ost among the hundreds of books and articles that analyze the international relations of the Middle East by focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict stands Egypt’s disastrous L military intervention in Yemen. This largely forgotten episode, which got underway immediately following the death of North Yemen’s dynastic ruler in September 1962 and lasted until Egyptian troops left the country almost exactly five years later, played a pivotal role in transforming Cairo’s influence in inter-Arab politics, shaping Egypt’s strategic partnership with the Soviet Union, undermining relations between Cairo and Washington, and setting the stage for the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. How such a major turning-point in regional affairs could remain overlooked for so long is a story in itself, which Jesse Ferris addresses at the outset of Nasser’s Gamble. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Egypt’s diplomatic and military archives continue to be closed to academic researchers. Another part reflects the impact of the momentous 1967 war, which ended up eclipsing almost all other aspects of Egyptian foreign policy from the 1952 revolution to the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. In addition, Ferris notes that Anwar al-Sadat was “an enthusiastic proponent of the intervention in Yemen and one of those most responsible for its consequences” (17). Once al-Sadat assumed the presidency of Egypt in the fall of 1970, prospects for a public (much less an objective) examination of the Yemen war plummeted. Journalists, intellectuals, government officials and military commanders alike deliberately avoided dredging up the memory of what was at best a bitter failure of Egyptian leadership and at worst a painful instance of “corruption, insubordination, and incompetence in the armed forces” (19). Ferris sets out to restore the balance by exploring several interrelated dimensions of Cairo’s half-decade adventure in Yemen. No other study of Egyptian involvement in the Yemeni civil war covers so many different topics, nor rests on such a solid foundation of source materials in Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. In earlier studies, Adeed Dawisha explained Cairo’s decision to embark on the expedition in terms of the entrenched attitudes and perceptions of key policy-makers;1 Laura James highlighted aspects of political culture, which generated the profound miscalculations that led Egyptian leaders to embark on the risky operation;2 and Ali Rahmy and Saeed Badeeb traced reciprocal strategic interactions between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, without delving as deeply into the causes and vicissitudes of Egyptian policy.3 1 Adeed I. Dawisha, “Intervention in the Yemen: An Analysis of Egyptian Perceptions and Policies,” Middle East Journal 29(Winter 1975); Dawisha, “Perceptions, Decisions and Consequences in Foreign Policy: The Egyptian Intervention in Yemen,” Political Studies 25(June 1977). 2 Laura M. James, Nasser at War: Arab Images of the Enemy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chaps. 4-5. 3 Ali Abdel Rahman Rahmy, The Egyptian Policy in the Arab World: Intervention in Yemen, 1962-1967 (Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1983); Saeed M. Badeeb, The Saudi-Egyptian Conflict over North Yemen, 1962-1970 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1986). H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XV, No. 6 (2013) Nasser’s Gamble emphasizes political-economic trends inside Egypt as the driving force behind the intervention, but the book goes on to wrestle with a range of other facets of the Yemeni civil war. Cairo’s actions both reflected and transformed regional rivalries associated with the global Cold War, a topic that Salim Yaqub has done much to elucidate. The fate of Egypt’s involvement was sealed by the complex politics of North Yemen, through whose intricacies and vagaries one could have no better guide than J. E. Peterson. And the book offers an innovative perspective on Soviet military and economic assistance to the Egyptian war effort, thereby contributing to a body of scholarship pioneered by Yaacov Ro’i. The three reviewers evaluate the insights that the book accords specialists in these discrete fields, as well as the ways in which that Ferris synthesizes the separate strands of the narrative into a compelling whole. Participants: Jesse Ferris is Vice President for Strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and a BA in History from Yale University. His first book, Nasser’s Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power was published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. He is currently at work on a history of Israeli foreign policy. Fred H. Lawson is Lynn T. White, Jr. Professor of Government at Mills College. He is author most recently of Global Security Watch Syria (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2013). Dr. J.E. Peterson is a historian and political analyst specializing in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf. He has taught at various universities in the United States, has been associated with a number of leading research institutes, and served as historian in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Yemen: The Search for a Modern State, as well as many scholarly articles and contributions to edited works. Yaacov Ro’i is Professor of History Emeritus at Tel-Aviv University. Among others, he is editor of The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War (Woodrow Wilson Center and Stanford University, 2008) and has written several articles on Soviet policy in the Middle East and Soviet-Egyptian relations. Salim Yaqub is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations, with a particular focus on U.S. involvement in the Middle East. He is also director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East, was published in 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Yaqub is now writing a book on U.S.-Arab relations in the 1970s. 3 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. XV, No. 6 (2013) Review by J.E. Peterson, Tucson, Arizona his is very much a case study of Egyptian foreign policy – primarily political and military – with emphasis on Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s (hereafter Nasser) tortured T relations with the superpowers. The principal thesis, i.e., a “revisionist interpretation of the Six-Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi-Egyptian struggle over Yemen” (22) is well argued, although the afterword’s contention that Nasser failure in Yemen and the catastrophe of the 1967 war were responsible for a fundamental shift in the regional balance of power in the Middle East may be somewhat overly ambitious. The book has been adapted from the author’s 2008 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, “Egypt, the Cold War, and the Civil War in Yemen, 1962-1966,” and the change in the title for the book, along with the addition of a seventh chapter on the Six-Day War and the end of intervention in Yemen, seem to redirect emphasis away from the Yemen case study and towards Egypt’s relations with the superpowers and the beginning of Nasser’s ‘twilight’ more generally. There may not be a lot of surprises in the author’s conclusions, particularly since the subject of his focus is a very well-trodden path. But Jesse Ferris has been at pains to utilize as much source material as possible, including publications and archives in English, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, and German. As a consequence, this book provides persuasive documentation for events and policies that generally have been long accepted but not verified. The one major lacuna is the official Egyptian record but, as Ferris points out, Egyptian archives remain closed. He does, though, rely heavily on published memoirs. It cannot be emphasized too highly that this is a book about Nasser and his Egypt. While the case study consists of the background to and impact of the war in Yemen, as the title states, Yemen remains relatively peripheral to Ferris’s story. This reviewer would have liked to have seen more discussion of what was happening in Yemen itself. The major figures in Yemeni politics at that seminal time are not fleshed out, and this can sometimes lead to inaccurate impressions.
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