LaronSoviet Policy toward the United Arab Republic, 1965–1967 Stepping Back from the Third World Soviet Policy toward the United Arab Republic, 1965–1967 ✣ Guy Laron Introduction A rich body of literature written both during and after the Cold War has ar- gued that despite the dominance of superpower struggle after World War II, smaller powers—whether allies of the United States, allies of the Soviet Union, or nonaligned states—were able to have some inºuence on interna- tional politics. Social scientists explained, both theoretically and empirically, how weak partners can force the more powerful members of an alliance to serve their whims—a pattern that Winston Churchill once referred to as the “tyranny of the weak.” Studies written after the end of the Cold War based on newly available evidence have conªrmed that countries such as Cuba and Vietnam acted relatively autonomously and that even East Germany had con- siderable leeway.1 A wealth of materials recently released from former Soviet-bloc and West- ern archives, as well as Egyptian memoirs, makes it possible to show that Soviet-Egyptian relations in the mid-1960s ªt this same pattern, with the 1. Annette Baker Fox, The Power of Small States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” The Review of Economics and Sta- tistics, Vol. 48, No. 3 (August 1966), pp. 266–279; Robert L. Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Paul M. Johnson, “The Subordinate States and Their Strategy,” in Jan Triska, ed., Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin Amer- ica and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986); James D. Morrow, “Alliances and Asymmetry: An Alternative to the Capability Aggregation Model of Alli- ances,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 35, No. 4 (November 1991), pp. 904–933; Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Piero Gleijeses, Conºicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Af- rica, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2005). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 99–118 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00049 by guest on 24 September 2021 Laron weaker state (Egypt) often able to inºuence its dominant partner. But this is not the way these relations were usually seen by contemporaries and scholars. The view that the Soviet Union encouraged the Arabs to ªght Israel in 1967 rests primarily on the contents of an intelligence report that Soviet ofªcials delivered to the Egyptian government on 13 May 1967. The report, which falsely alleged that Israel intended to attack Syria within two weeks, initiated a chain of events that ended with the onset of the June 1967 Six-Day Mideast War. Over the past decade, a stormy debate has raged over the question of whether the Soviet Union intentionally misled the United Arab Republic (UAR, Egypt’s ofªcial name at the time) in 1967 and why it might have done so.2 This article shows that the Soviet Union did not in fact seek to provoke an armed conºict in the Middle East and that the war began because of inde- pendent actions by Egypt. Although earlier studies by Karen Dawisha, Robert Freedman, and Jon Glassman have mentioned some of the themes that appear here (e.g., the different views among Soviet leaders, the USSR’s need to en- hance its naval presence in the Mediterranean, and the cautious line taken by the Soviet Politburo), the newly available evidence shows much more clearly how Soviet policy in the Middle East was inºuenced by the actions of local states. The evidence presented here contradicts the thesis of a recent book by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, who claim that the Soviet Union was ac- tively seeking to ignite a confrontation in the Middle East in the lead-up to the June 1967 war. The evidence supports recent studies by Galia Golan and Yaacov Ro’i, both of whom have argued that the Soviet Union did not intend to start a war in the Middle East.3 This article reviews the shift that occurred in Soviet policy toward the 2. Jon K. Glassman, Arms to the Arabs: The Soviet Union and War in the Middle East (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 37–44; Karen Dawisha, Soviet Foreign Policy towards Egypt (Lon- don: St. Martin’s Press, 1979); Richard D. Anderson, Jr., Public Politics in an Authoritarian State: Making Foreign Policy during the Brezhnev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 190; and Galia Golan, “The Soviet Union and the Outbreak of the June 1967 Six-Day War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 3–19. See also, Yaacov Ro’i and Boris Morozov, eds., The Soviet Union and the June 1967 Six Day War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008)—especially the articles by Ro’i, Morozov, and Yair Even. Although these scholars differ in their interpretations of Soviet behavior on the eve of the Six-Day Mideast War, they all agree that, for one reason or another, the Soviet Union deliberately conveyed a false or at least exaggerated report. For claims by Soviet diplomats that the Soviet Union had no ill intentions in providing the false intelli- gence report, see Karen Brutents, Tridstat’ let na Staroi Ploshchadi (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniya, 1998), pp. 373–374; Georgii Kornienko, Kholodnaya voina: Svidetel’stvo ee uchastnika (Moscow: Ulma-Press, 2001), pp. 167–174; and Richard B. Parker, The Politics of Miscalculation in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 21–35. 3. Robert O. Freedman, Moscow and the Middle East: Soviet Policy since the Invasion of Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Other studies are mentioned in the previous footnote. 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00049 by guest on 24 September 2021 Soviet Policy toward the United Arab Republic, 1965–1967 Third World after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964, a shift spurred by changes in the international system in the latter half of the 1960s. For two years before the Six-Day Mideast War, Soviet-Egyptian relations were increasingly troubled because the Soviet Union wanted to disengage from rad- ical regimes in the Third World, the UAR included. During those two years, the Soviet Union pressured Egypt to reform its economy and decrease its in- volvement in Yemen, and the Soviet Navy tried to gain unfettered access to Egyptian ports. Yet, Egyptian leaders ignored this pressure and took major de- cisions in disregard of Moscow’s wishes. In this broader context even the much vaunted intelligence memorandum of 13 May 1967 appears in a differ- ent light. Although the Soviet message alleged that Israel was about to attack Syria, it also urged the Egyptians to avoid any rash action and allow the Soviet Union to defuse the crisis by diplomatic means. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser ignored the Soviet request, sent his army into Sinai, and sparked a regional crisis. His actions strengthened rifts among Soviet leaders—rifts that were on full display when the Egyptian minister of war visited Moscow at the end of May 1967. Some ofªcials in Moscow surreptitiously asked the Egyptians to apply pressure on the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during a key debate. This episode highlights a rare mo- ment in the Cold War when a group of Soviet ofªcials encouraged a Third World country to intervene in the CPSU’s high-level internal debates. In discussing these events, this article explains why the Soviet Union dis- engaged from radical Third World regimes after 1964, how that global shift affected Soviet-Egyptian relations, and how the Egyptians reacted and tried to steer events in a favorable direction. Stepping Back from the Third World In the mid-1960s, a sea-change occurred in Soviet foreign policy as the as- sumptions that had guided policy during the Khrushchev era no longer seemed valid. Khrushchev and his colleagues had assumed that the situation in Europe had reached an impasse and that neither side could win, and they saw the Third World as a back door through which the Soviet bloc could snatch victory form the jaws of the European stalemate. By supporting “revo- lutionary national liberation movements” in the Third World, they hoped that they could erode the political and strategic position of the West and weaken the West’s hold on essential raw materials, eventually leading to capi- talism’s downfall.4 4. Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 72; Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union from Sta- 101 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00049 by guest on 24 September 2021 Laron The triumvirate of leaders who replaced Khrushchev in October 1964 in- cluded Leonid Brezhnev as CPSU General Secretary and Aleksei Kosygin as prime minister, along with Nikolai Podgornyi, who soon became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Khrushchev’s approach to Third World affairs seemed increasingly dubious amid a spate of bad news in 1964–1965 regarding right-wing military coups in Indonesia, Congo, Algeria, and other African countries.