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Britain, the Transatlantic Alliance, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973

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Britain, the Transatlantic Alliance, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 HugBritain,hes the Transatlantic Alliance, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 Britain, the Transatlantic Alliance, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 ✣ Geraint Hughes The Yom Kippur, or Ramadan, war of 6–25 October 1973 cost the lives of 2,687 Israelis and 15,000–16,000 Arabs.1 The war also disrupted the incipient U.S.-Soviet détente and spurred Arab oil producers to impose an oil embargo against the West on 17 October 1973, contributing to a global recession and sparking a temporary rift between the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). West European politicians blamed the United States for provoking the embargo through its assistance to Israel and resented U.S. demands for unqualiªed support in the Middle East. A comment attributed to Henry Kissinger at the time—that “I don’t care what happens to NATO. I’m so disgusted”—may have been apocryphal, but it reºected the irritation that President Richard Nixon’s na- tional security adviser felt toward the European allies. On the other side of the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Edward Heath was dismayed by the U.S. de- cision to raise the alert level of U.S. nuclear forces to Defense Condition 3 (DEFCON3) without giving his government adequate warning.2 The intra- Western crisis caused by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war can therefore be compared with other cases of transatlantic discord, such as those concerning Suez in 1956, the Polish crisis of 1980–1982, the Bosnian civil war from 1992 to 1995, and the Iraq war of 2003. Scholars have studied many aspects of the October 1973 war, particularly the military dimension of the conºict, the implications of the war for the intractable feud between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the effects of the 1. As far as casualties are concerned, the 1973 war was exceeded only by the 1948 war of independence and the 1967 Six-Day War. See Ahron Bregman, Israel’s Wars, 1947–93 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 23, 92; and Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 304. 2. Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), p. 482; and Heath to Lord Bridges (Private Secretary to Prime Minister), 28 October 1973, in PREM15/1382, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 2008, pp. 3–40 © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.3 by guest on 30 September 2021 Hughes crisis on the Cold War.3 Less attention has been paid, however, to the wider diplomatic implications for transatlantic ties. Although Raymond Garthoff deals sympathetically with West European criticisms of the Nixon administra- tion’s policies during and after the October 1973 war, other accounts tend to echo Kissinger’s portrayal of the European allies as having jeopardized the West’s collective interests in the Middle East because of their economic self- interest and lack of resolve when faced with the Arab oil embargo.4 More re- cently, though, scholars have begun to look more closely at the West Euro- pean countries’ decision to break ranks with the United States.5 This article focuses on Britain’s part in the conºict, affording an additional perspective on the diplomatic confrontation that accompanied the clash of Israeli, Egyptian, and Syrian armies in the Sinai desert and the Golan Heights. The article pro- vides a corrective to the stark accusations of myopia and spinelessness leveled by Kissinger and other U.S. ofªcials against Britain and other NATO allies in late 1973. Although the interaction between U.S. and British policies in the Middle East during the post-1945 period has attracted considerable attention, schol- ars have tended to focus on the rise of the United States in replacing Britain as the dominant external power in the region. Some have depicted this process as a “changing of the guard” that suited British strategic and economic interests, whereas others argue that it was a hostile takeover in which a weakened Brit- ain was muscled out of the Arab world by its supposed ally. Historians have also debated the precise point at which the decline of British inºuence in the 3. Bregman, Israel’s Wars, pp. 66–94; Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Mid- dle East (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1982); The Sunday Times Insight Team, The Yom Kippur War (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975); Walter Laquer, Confrontation: The Middle East and World Poli- tics (London: Sphere, 1974); Edgar O’Ballance, No Victor, No Vanquished: The Yom Kippur War (Lon- don: Barrie and Jenkins, 1979); and Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War (New York: Schocken Books, 2004). For memoirs, see Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone, 1990); Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982); Victor Israelyan, Inside the Kremlin during the Yom Kippur War (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); and Mohamed Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (London: Collins, 1975). Arabs refer to the 1973 conºict as the Ramadan War, and the Israelis and most Western scholars refer to it as the Yom Kippur War. Throughout this article I will refer to it as the 1973 war or the October war. 4. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 450–454. The tendency to portray European policies in 1973 in a negative light is evident in Kissinger’s Years of Upheaval, pp. 707–722. See also Coral Bell, “The October Middle East War: A Case Study in Crisis Management during Détente,” International Affairs, Vol. 50, No. 4 (October 1974), pp. 539–540; Walter J. Boyne, The Two O’Clock War: The 1973 Yom Kippur Conºict and the Airlift That Saved Israel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), pp. 87–88, 165; and Laquer, Confrontation, pp. 181–187. 5. The ªndings of a conference on European-American relations from 1956 to 2003, sponsored by the Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, will eventually be published. Daniel Moeckli’s European Political Cooperation: The EC’s Struggle towards a Common Foreign Policy, 1969–74 (London: I. B. Tauris, forthcoming) also covers the impact of the 1973 war on U.S.-West European relations. 4 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2008.10.2.3 by guest on 30 September 2021 Britain, the Transatlantic Alliance, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 Middle East began. Some have cited 1956 (the Suez crisis), others point to 1958 (the overthrow of the pro-British monarchy in Iraq), and still others have mentioned 1971 (the year the withdrawal of British garrisons from the Persian Gulf was completed).6 Yet in spite of the protracted decline of regional inºuence, successive British governments continued to act as though their country had a role to play in Middle Eastern affairs. This attitude was not merely a product of vainglory or imperialistic nostalgia; rather, it derived from geopolitical and economic realities. The Middle East was a focal point for Cold War competition because of the Arab-Israeli conºict, Soviet efforts to exploit regional tensions and to bolster its position as the patron of “progres- sive” Arab regimes and political movements, and the crucial economic impor- tance of regional oil supplies for West European countries. The United Kingdom’s status in the international sphere had diminished by the early 1970s, but British policymakers wanted to uphold their country’s strategic and commercial interests in the Arab world.7 In addition, the article challenges received wisdom about the postwar Anglo-American alliance. The dispute between the Heath government and the Nixon administration over the 1973 war does not ªt well with the views of those who, like Scott Lucas, contend that “Britain paid the price of perma- nent subservience to American policy” in order to mend relations with the United States after Suez. The depiction of the “special relationship” as one of dominance and obedience has recently been popularized by critics of Tony Blair’s decision to support the U.S.-led war in Iraq.8 Yet the image of a subser- vient Britain forced to subordinate its foreign policy interests to those of its superpower ally is a caricature. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 was one of sev- eral issues during the Cold War that provoked Anglo-American discord, and this episode poses three questions for scholars. Why did Britain side with its West European partners in refusing to endorse the Nixon administration’s policies in October 1973? How was the rift between Washington and London 6. See, for example, Nigel Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955–59 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 1996); Peter Hahn, The United States, Great Britain and Egypt, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Sceptre, 1991); Ritchie Ovendale, Britain, the United States and the Transfer of Power in the Middle East, 1945–1962 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996); and Simon C. Smith, “Power Transferred? Britain, the United States, and the Gulf, 1956–71,” in Contemporary British History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 1–23. 7. DOP(73)26, Oman, 2 April 1973, in CAB148/130, TNAUK; CM(73)46th, 16 October 1973, in CAB128/53, TNAUK; and Clive Jones and John Stone, “Britain and the Arabian Gulf: New Perspec- tives on Strategic Inºuence,” International Relations, Vol.
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