The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969–1973

In this readable and at times dramatic study, Craig Daigle offers a complex perspective on the nuclear superpower era of détente, discussing both the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Arab-Israeli conflict during a four-year time span that witnessed two Middle Eastern wars. Daigle draws particularly on U.S. State Department archival documents and memoirs by former Soviet, Arab, and Israeli officials. He maintains that the 1969–1970 War of Attrition and the October 1973 war between Israeli and Arab armies resulted not only from tensions and competing interests between the Middle East belligerents, but also from policies adopted in both Washington and Moscow toward their clients. As the title indicates, détente as an effort at cooperative relationships and a new period of non-war in global affairs had a mixed, indeed limited, record of achievement. For the most part, the Arab-Israeli conflict caused problems for détente, and détente exacerbated Arab-Israeli tensions, with not much...