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Words and Shadows: Evolution of

Middle East Strategy

 

 

hen I entered office I knew little of the Middle East. I had never visited any Arab country; I was not familiar with the liturgy of Middle East negotiations. The first time I heard one of the staple formulas of the region’s diplomacy was at a dinner at the British Embassy in February 1969. Someone invoked the sacramental language of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, mumbling about the need for a just and lasting peace within secure and recognized borders. I thought the phrase so platitudinous that I accused the speaker of pulling my leg. It was a mistake I was not to repeat. By the end of my time in office I had become like all other old Middle East hands; word had become reality, form and substance had merged. I was immersed in the ambiguities, passions, and frustrations of that maddening, heroic, and exhilarating region. If the reader finds the diplomacy outlined in this chapter an agonizing swamp of endless maneuvering and confusion, he knows how I felt.

 

My personal acquaintance with the area before 1969 was limited to three brief private visits to Israel during the 1960s. I recall particularly vividly my visit to Kibbutz Ginossar, the home of Yigal Allon, a student in my International Seminar at Harvard in 1957 and later my colleague as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel. His kibbutz is on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Every square inch of its intensively cultivated soil had been wrested by faith and suffering from the hostile circumstances of geography and conflict. Across the Sea of Galilee I remember seeing a solitary fishing boat at the edge of the escarpment of the Golan Heights, within easy range of Syrian rifles. I thought then how little the materialist philosophers understood of human motivation. Here were a people, sustained by faith through two millennia of persecution, come to reclaim dreams that for all this time had been more powerful than their tragic reality. But I thought too that the meaning of this faith must not be exhausted in the heroic defense of a country that threatened to turn into another beleaguered ghetto. Sooner or later there had to be a reconciliation with the men and women on top of the escarpment. Peace in the Middle East was not only a physical necessity but a spiritual fulfillment. It never occurred to me that some day I might join the struggle for it.

 

Nor did I then appreciate quite how the flood of words used to justify the various demands obscured rather than illuminated fundamental positions. In that barren region of deserts and stark mountains from which three of the world’s great religions have emerged, there is a profound temptation toward exaltation, magnified by the fact that geography has set no bound to the human imagination. Only the dedicated can survive in such adversity of topography and climate; man’s principal solace is not nature but faith and the human relationship. Nowhere else is there to be found such a collection of leaders of such sharply etched personality; nowhere else do the convictions of individual statesmen play so pivotal a role. Man is united with his fellows by faith, and the word plays here an often decisive role. Whether in the Israelis’ Talmudic exegesis or the Arabs’ tendency toward epic poetry, the line is easily crossed beyond what the pragmatic West would consider empirical reality into the sphere of passionate rhetoric and the realm of human inspiration. Woe to the unwary outsider who takes this linguistic exuberance literally and seeks to find a solution by asking adversaries what they really want.

 

What the parties to the Middle East conflict really want lies deep in an amalgam of convictions, resentments, and dreams. Formal positions are like the shadows in Plato’s cave—reflections of a transcendent reality almost impossible to encompass in the dry legalisms of a negotiating process.

 

The conflict has not lasted for thousands of years, as is often said. It is very much a product of our twentieth century. The movements of Zionism and Arab nationalism, to be sure, were spawned in the late 1800s but they were not directed against each other. Only when the centuries of Ottoman rule had given way to the British Mandate, and the prospect of self-determination for Palestine emerged, did the Arab and the Jew, after having coexisted peacefully for generations, begin their mortal struggle over the political future of this land. The modern era, which gave birth to this communal conflict, then bestowed all its malevolent possibilities upon it. The Nazi holocaust added moral urgency to the quest for a Jewish state. But no sooner was it established and blessed by the international community in 1948 than it was forced to defend its independence against Arab neighbors who did not see why they should make sacrifices to atone for European iniquities in which they had had no part. Israel’s victory in the 1948-1949 war in turn fueled the fires of Arab nationalism as traditional regimes, discredited by defeat, came under the sway of radical ideology—Pan-Arabism and socialism. Then the region became the focal point of Cold War rivalry, which both exacerbated local conflict and posed the danger that outside powers could be dragged into major confrontation.

 

By 1969, Israel had existed for twenty years unrecognized by its neighbors, harassed by guerrillas, assaulted in international forums, and squeezed by Arab economic boycott. Its very shape expressed the tenuous quality of its statehood; it was only nine miles wide at the narroWest point between the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan border; the main road between divided Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at some places was located less than a hundred yards from Arab outposts. With implacable adversaries on all its frontiers, Israel’s foreign policy had become indistinguishable from its defense policy; its cardinal and ultimate objective was what for most other nations is the starting point of foreign policy—acceptance by its neighbors of its right to exist. It naturally saw in the territories occupied in 1967 an assurance of the security that it had vainly sought throughout its existence. It strove for both territory and recognition, reluctant to admit that these objectives might prove incompatible.

 

This gulf in perceptions—in which, as in all tragedies, both sides represented a truth—is what had given the Arab-Israeli conflict its bitter intractability. When truths collide, compromise becomes the first casualty. Agreements are achieved only through evasions. Progress evaporates as the parties approach specifics. This became increasingly apparent when we took office. The Middle East was still mired in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Positions had hardened, diplomacy was stalemated, and hostilities were increasing.

 

On June 5, 1967, Israel had exploded across its frontiers, climaxing a sequence of events in which Arab rhetoric had run away with Arab intentions. In May 1967 the Soviet Union had warned Egypt that an Israeli attack on Syria was imminent. This Soviet claim was false; whether it was a deliberate untruth designed to provoke tension and gain some cheap credit or whether it was an honest misunderstanding, it set in motion a fateful process. President Gamal Abdel Nasser impetuously ordered his army into the Sinai, which had been in practice demilitarized since 1956, and announced that he was closing the Strait of Tiran, which controlled access to the Israeli port of Eilat from the Red Sea. He asked United Nations Secretary-General U Thant to remove the United Nations Emergency Force, which separated Israeli and Egyptian forces along the international boundary. It is doubtful that Nasser sought a military showdown; it is even possible that he was astonished by the alacrity with which U Thant acceded to his request. Nasser may have intended to do no more than strike a heroic pose.

 

Sometimes events mocking the intentions of the actors race out of control. Once the Egyptian army replaced the UN force on its frontier, Israel had no choice but to mobilize, because Israel’s territory was too small to absorb a first blow. And once Israel mobilized, its decision to fight had to be made in a matter of weeks, for its economy could not stand the indefinite loss of manpower absorbed by the mobilization, and it could not demobilize with the Egyptian army on its borders. But international diplomacy operated at its leisurely pace. Exploration followed consultation and reassurance; the world’s statesmen discussed various formulas to overcome the announced blockade of the Strait of Tiran. Inconclusive exchanges drifted on until Israel wiped out the Egyptian air force in one blow by a surprise attack on the morning of June 5. The war ended in six days with Israel occupying territories in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank of the Jordan River. The new territory seized was three times the size of Israel itself.

 

Arab radicalism grew exponentially in the wake of the 1967 war. The policy of Egypt, the pivotal Arab country, and indeed of much of the Arab world, was still driven by the volatile Nasser. The growing presence of Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan threatened the survival of the moderate, pro-Western Hashemite King Hussein; agitation by the same groups kept Lebanon effectively without a government through most of 1969. The Soviet Union implanted itself more firmly in the region by sending massive military supplies to Egypt, Iraq, and Syria; the Arab front-line states, having cut their ties to the United States in 1967, became dependent on Soviet support, diplomatic as well as material. Whatever the Soviets’ formal diplomatic position, their arms supply reinforced the irredentist and intransigent streak of Arab policy, expressed by the Khartoum Arab Summit of late August 1967 in the unanimous proclamation of the “three no’s”—”no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

 

Gradually some quarters in the Arab world began to understand that intransigence would perpetuate continued Israeli occupation of captured territories. While Syria turned its back on negotiations, Egypt and Jordan undertook tentative and reluctant feelers toward some form of accommodation. They demanded Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 5, 1967, boundaries, but indicated a willingness to consider declarations of nonbelligerency, the right of each state to a secure existence, and recognition of Israel. Though this marked a quantum advance from the hostility that had characterized Arab attitudes for two decades, it fell far short of Israel’s stated requirements: face-to-face negotiations, secure and recognized boundaries (a euphemism for border changes), frontiers open to trade and travel, and a guarantee of free navigation through the international waterways. Even the moderate Arabs would settle for nothing less than total withdrawal and they rejected direct talks. (At least publicly. Jordan in fact maintained secret direct contacts with Israel during that period.) The radical Arabs refused a peace process on any basis.

 

The Palestinian commando organization Al Fatah in a policy statement of October 1968 rejected “all compromises aiming at halt of armed strife,” warned Arab governments against pursuing such a course, and declared itself in favor of a “free, open, non-sectarian, non-racist society in Palestine”[91]—in other words, abolishing the state of Israel altogether.

 

Resolution 242, about which I was to hear so much more, merely papered over these differences when it was adopted by the UN Security Council on November 22, 1967, with the approval of the two sides. It spoke of a “just and lasting peace” within “secure and recognized boundaries”; it called for an end to “claims or states of belligerency,” for Israeli withdrawal “from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and for acknowledgment of all states’ “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence.” But it soon became apparent that these ambiguous phrases were acceptable to each party only because it could interpret them in its own favor. Egypt and Jordan interpreted the clause “withdrawal from territories occupied” to require withdrawal from all captured soil; Israel took “secure and recognized boundaries” to exclude a return to the lines before the Six Day War. To Israel withdrawal meant giving up tangible safeguards and it demanded a quid pro quo; to the Arabs withdrawal meant getting back what in their view belonged to them—hence, they considered Israeli withdrawal their right and not an Israeli concession.

 

These clashing perspectives permeated the Middle East dispute and prevented any real bargaining; each side sought to achieve its primary goal as the entrance price into negotiations. Egypt insisted that Israeli withdrawal should precede fulfillment or even negotiation of any of the other conditions. Israel demanded face-to-face talks at the outset, which had the dual advantage of obtaining at least implied recognition and of minimizing the danger of great-power imposition. Jordan’s acquiescence in Resolution 242 had been obtained in 1967 by the promise of our United Nations Ambassador Arthur Goldberg that under its terms we would work for the return of the West Bank to Jordan with minor boundary rectifications and that we were prepared to use our influence to obtain a role for Jordan in Jerusalem. Since there were no negotiations going on, the promise was meaningless.

 

Resolution 242 instructed Secretary-General U Thant to appoint a Special Representative to talk to the parties and try to get negotiations started. Thant selected the Swedish Ambassador to Moscow, Gunnar Jarring. To see whether the dissonant voices might yield some coherence, Jarring began his mission by sending questionnaires to the parties asking their positions. After months of evasion they finally told him, each in its own convoluted language, what they had already declared publicly in simplified and sometimes demagogic language. When Jarring visited the Middle East he found that the real positions of the parties were even more incompatible than their public statements.

 

There was no little pathos in the emotions underlying each side’s arguments. Israel insisted on a “binding peace.” Only a country that had never known peace could have attached so much importance to that phrase. For what is a binding peace among sovereign nations when one of the attributes of sovereignty is the right to change one’s mind? For three centuries France and Germany had fought wars in almost every generation; each one was ended by a formal “binding” peace treaty that did nothing to prevent the next war. Nor did “open frontiers” in 1914 prevent the outbreak of a world war which shook Europe to its foundations. Most wars in history have been fought between countries that started out at peace; it was the special lunacy of the Middle East that its wars broke out between countries that were technically already at war.

 

Nasser insisted on unconditional withdrawal from all occupied territories—but he never explained what incentive Israel had for withdrawal in the face of his ambiguous offers of nonbelligerency. Nor did he cite a prior example of a peace settlement based solely on the unconditional withdrawal of the victor from the territory it had conquered. But for Nasser, the prospect of recognizing Israel was such a personal trauma that his mere mention of the phrase seemed to him to remove all necessity for giving it concrete meaning.

 

In other regions of the world these circumstances might have produced a stalemate broken from time to time by a series of wars until exhaustion produced the equilibrium that wisdom had been unable to define. But the Middle East, in the second half of the twentieth century, was at the vortex of global politics. Though in the late Sixties oil was not yet perceived as a scarce commodity, the importance of the Middle East—at the crossroads of continents and civilizations—was understood only too clearly. The Soviet Union, which in the late Forties had written off the Middle East as beyond its capacity to influence,[92] had leaped in ten years later by a sale of arms and twenty years later by the dispatch of thousands of military advisers to Egypt. The Soviet presence constituted a major geopolitical change since World War II. For fifteen years it helped exacerbate the conflict. As time went on the Soviets acted with increasing boldness. In 1956, they meddled marginally in Suez crisis diplomacy and made vague threats of military involvement after our pressure on Britain and France had made it safe to do so. After 1967 the number of Soviet military advisers in the Middle East increased fivefold. Through the Sixties Soviet influence grew dramatically in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, and in later years, Libya. The 1967 war, which they helped to provoke, enabled the Soviets for the first time in history to establish a permanent fleet of some fifty warships in the Mediterranean Sea.

 

The roles of outside powers were almost as complex as those of the principal actors. The Soviet Union acted as advocate of the Arab cause; it espoused Arab proposals and offered no hint of possible compromise. The West European countries were torn between their impotence and their premonition of the economic dangers of another conflict. The most active, de Gaulle’s France, in effect embraced the Arab position after the Six Day War. As for the United States, President Johnson in a speech on June 19, 1967, sought to navigate the reefs of controversy by avoiding any precision; in his discussion of borders, recognition, and maritime rights he foreshadowed what later became the mystical ambiguities of Resolution 242. Egypt, together with other Arab states, had broken diplomatic relations with the United States in the aftermath of the 1967 war. We were thus without senior diplomats in the capitals of the key Arab countries, which nevertheless demanded our help in the negotiating process. Nasser insisted that we pressure Israel in his behalf, holding out in return the prospect of restoring diplomatic relations with us. Why we should pay a price for the restoration of relations which he had cut off under a totally false pretext was never made clear. [Nasser had accused the United States of direct military participation on Israel’s side in the 1967 war. President Johnson insisted that Nasser recant this charge before diplomatic relations could be resumed. Nasser did so through the press, but Johnson insisted that Nasser make the gesture directly to the United States.] We had all the less incentive to do so as long as his policy continued to rely on Soviet support and catered to radical passions throughout the Arab world.

 

I had always believed it essential to reduce the scope of Soviet adventurist policies in the Middle East. For that reason the United States performance in the Suez crisis of 1956 had struck me as deplorable. We should have understood that our sudden withdrawal of financial support for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam would be the beginning, not the end, of a crisis. And the crisis when it occurred was in my view mishandled. Whatever one’s view of the wisdom of the British and French military action, I was convinced that we would pay heavily in the years ahead for our shortsighted playing to the gallery. I did not think that manhandling our closest allies would achieve the lasting gratitude of Nasser or those who admired him; on the contrary, he would probably be confirmed in a course fundamentally inimical to Western interests. The moderate regimes buttressed by British power and prestige, especially in Iraq, were likely to be weakened if not doomed by what they could only see as our siding with the radical elements exemplified by Nasser. Britain and France, their self-confidence and sense of global relevance shattered, would hasten to shed their remaining international responsibilities. The realities of power would then impel us to fill the resulting vacuum in the Middle East and East of Suez and so take on our own shoulders all the moral onus of difficult geopolitical decisions.

 

When I reached high office, however, my ability to implement my views on Middle East policy differed from my position on other issues. On other topics Nixon would listen to the agencies for a while and then act from the White House; thus my office assumed constantly growing responsibilities. But in the Middle East the President made a distinction between my planning and my operational functions. I was allowed to plan, to warn, to delay; I could force deliberations into the NSC framework—but until the end of 1971 I was not permitted to conduct diplomacy except in rare periods of acute crisis such as the Syrian invasion of Jordan in September 1970.

 

The two main reasons for this, in my view, were Nixon’s ambivalent relationship with Secretary of State Rogers and his assessment of the domestic liabilities of an active Middle East policy. Because Nixon’s distrust of the State Department thrust me forward and inevitably embarrassed and frustrated Rogers, Nixon constantly sought means to comfort his old friend. One was to reserve some area of foreign policy for Rogers’s predominant influence. But what Nixon gave with one hand he tended to take away with the other. The areas he did not mind consigning were those where success seemed elusive, such as Africa, or those where the risks of domestic reaction were high. The Middle East met both of Nixon’s criteria. He calculated that almost any active policy would fail; in addition, it would almost certainly incur the wrath of Israel’s supporters. So he found it useful to get the White House as much out of the direct line of fire as possible.

 

He also suspected that my Jewish origin might cause me to lean too much toward Israel. And, like other Presidents, he was not above feeding the rivalry inherent (despite the ritualistic protestations to the contrary) between the offices of Secretary of State and security adviser in order to enhance his own control.

 

There was a further personality reason for the relatively more active role of the State Department in the Middle East, and it lay in the character of the Assistant Secretary who was appointed to head its bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Intense, gregarious, occasionally frenetic, Joseph Sisco was not a conventional Foreign Service Officer. He had never served overseas; only the insistence of Dean Rusk had earned him promotion to the highest rank of the service, which selection boards applying more conventional criteria consistently denied him. Once there, he turned out to be a living proof of what imaginative leadership could achieve in the State Department even under a President determined to conduct his own foreign policy. Enormously inventive, with a talent for the stratagems that are the lifeblood of Middle East diplomacy, sometimes offering more solutions than there were problems, Joe Sisco seized the bureaucratic initiative and never surrendered it. He was adroit in the ways of Washington and quickly established a personal relationship with me, perceiving that in the Nixon Administration Presidential authority would be the ultimate arbiter. In the end, he probably spent as much time mediating between Rogers and me as between the Arabs and Israelis. Much of the information that the White House was given about the day-to-day course of the State Department’s Middle East initiatives came from Sisco to me or to Hal Saunders, my senior staff assistant on the Middle East. Joe managed to remain loyal to both his bosses, Rogers and the President, and served both well. After I became Secretary of State I made him Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the highest career policymaking position in the Department. In that capacity he became an indispensable collaborator and a close friend.

 

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Initiatives Galore

 

hen a new Administration comes to office it is taken for granted that it will “tackle” the important world problems; new Presidents always chide their predecessors for leaving issues not yet conclusively “solved.” It is difficult for any American leader to accept the fact that in some conflicts opposing positions are simply irreconcilable. Indeed, when readiness to compromise does not exist, forcing the issue prematurely will magnify insecurity and instability; events that should be slowed down may be accelerated; pressures are generated that cannot be controlled. Every new Administration must learn—often the hard way—that one of the most difficult responsibilities of policymaking is the patience to pick the right moment for decisive action.

 

Many temptations to “do something” awaited the new Administration when it took office. In early February 1969 Israeli sources reported that 1,288 incidents of sabotage and terrorism had taken place in the year and a half from the Six Day War to the end of 1968: 920 incidents on the Jordanian front, 166 on the Egyptian border, 37 on the cease-fire line with Syria, 35 on the Lebanese border, and 130 in Gaza. Israeli losses for the same period were reported as 234 dead and 765 wounded among military personnel and 47 dead and 330 wounded among civilians—a staggering total for a country with a population of 2.5 million, equivalent to over 20,000 dead and 100,000 wounded for a nation the size of America. Israel retaliated by air attacks on suspected guerrilla bases in Jordan; it staged a major attack against the Beirut international airport on December 28, 1968; and artillery duels across the Suez Canal were a regular occurrence.

 

There was no shortage of invitations for American diplomatic involvement. Two in particular were awaiting the new Administration: On December 30 the Soviets had suggested a peace plan to implement Resolution 242; it reflected the Arab demand for total Israeli withdrawal and a definition of peace so minimal as to be an obvious nonstarter. On January 16, 1969, France proposed Four-Power consultations on the Middle East—among the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France.

 

At our NSC meeting on February 1 we had to decide how to respond to these initiatives and basically whether to depart from the low- profile policy that had characterized the Johnson years. It rapidly became clear that the State Department was eager to launch an American initiative. What objective or strategy this involvement should serve would be left to emerge in negotiation. State believed that it was our responsibility to help bridge the gap between the parties and point them toward compromise under Jarring. Moreover, since the fighting was intensifying, so the argument ran, we could not afford to appear indifferent. All the parties in the area professed to believe that the United States held the key to a settlement; hence, the Department argued, we should indeed involve ourselves actively. It was hoped that common ground could probably be achieved among the parties as well as among the outside powers by the sheer momentum of the negotiating process. As for the Soviet problem, the Department contended that since Moscow seemed to gain by exploiting the tensions of the area, a peace settlement was bound to frustrate its strategy. At a minimum such a course would test Soviet intentions.

 

The new President was about to undergo his first experience of the bureaucratic steamroller. It is the nature of a bureaucracy to move by almost imperceptible stages toward a goal it may itself only dimly perceive. The first move is usually to ask the President or the Secretary of State for authority to “explore” a certain course “in principle,” with solemn assurances that this decision creates neither precedent nor obligation for another step and that the policymakers will retain full control over the process. Invariably the first step implies a series of others; the exploration of a serious subject can only reveal its difficulties and spur pressures to overcome them. Soon the President is asked to act to remove an impasse his own policy has created. This is of course exactly what the advocates of an active policy desire; they are only too eager to put forward schemes to break the deadlock. Many MidEast experts in State had been unhappy with President Johnson’s aloof posture toward the conflict, which they attributed to domestic politics. Their eagerness was further stimulated by the cast of mind of some American diplomats that a crisis is somehow not genuine unless we are a party to it. This was the origin of the thought that we must never be perceived (never specifying by whom) as indifferent to emerging confrontations.

 

I had serious doubts about rushing into negotiations whose objectives we had not defined and for whose outcome we would be held responsible. I also questioned the assumptions underlying the recommendation. It seemed to me unlikely that we would find common ground between the parties. I did not particularly like the negotiating forums offered to us. Given Soviet and French biases toward the Arab viewpoint (and the pressures this put on the British), a Four-Power forum as proposed by France was likely to produce a lineup against the United States. On the other hand, Two-Power talks—between the United States and the Soviet Union—might, if they made any progress, give the Soviet Union the credit for having pressed a Middle East settlement on us, and if they failed, saddle us with the blame.

 

More serious than the choice of forum was the constant and fundamental premise—stated explicitly by one of the State Department representatives at the February 1 NSC meeting—that the United States would have to deliver Israeli agreement. It meant that we were being asked to pressure an ally on behalf of countries which, with the exception of Jordan, had broken relations with us, pursued policies generally hostile to us, and were clients of Moscow. I therefore doubted the advisability of American pressure for a general settlement until we could see more clearly what concessions the Arabs would make and until those who would benefit from it would be America’s friends, not Soviet clients. In the meantime I much preferred an Israeli-Jordanian negotiation, which would involve just such a friend, rather than an Israeli-Egyptian negotiation, in which we would be asked to bail out a Soviet protégé. In short, I thought the prerequisite of effective Middle East diplomacy was to reduce the Soviet influence so that progress could not be ascribed to its pressures and moderate governments gained some maneuvering room.

 

I expressed my concern to the President the day afterward. He had invited me to accompany him to Walter Reed Army Hospital to call on former President Eisenhower, then in an advanced stage of the illness that killed him seven weeks later. Propped up in an easy chair, Eisenhower appeared even more emaciated than the last time I had seen him. He spent much of the time warning Nixon against leaks of NSC proceedings. Nixon told him about our Middle East discussion. Eisenhower argued against major American involvement in the negotiations. Probably reflecting the agony he went through over Suez in 1956, he thought the best course was to let the parties work it out themselves. If we became active we would be forced in the end to become an arbiter and then offer the parties our own guarantee of whatever final arrangement emerged. This would keep us embroiled in Middle East difficulties forever.

 

The next day, I had not been in my office many minutes before an irate Eisenhower was on the phone. He had just read a New York Times story reporting that the NSC meeting had determined that the United States would now pursue a more active policy in the Middle East. With a vigor that belied my memory of his frailty—and a graphic vocabulary at variance with his sunny smile—he berated me for letting down the President by not restricting the number of NSC participants. It was my duty, he said, to prevent attempts by the bureaucracy to stampede the President with news leaks like this. What had happened underlined his strictures of the night before; we should keep hands off the Middle East.

 

The same day I sent Nixon my further reflections in a memorandum. I took it as given that he was about to decide on some form of active diplomacy, both in response to State’s prodding and because of his campaign pledges of a new American initiative. I sought to explain the likely costs of such a course and my doubts about its chances of success. It was true, I argued, that the parties would never by themselves be able to achieve a settlement amid the mounting violence. But it did not follow that we would do better. I doubted whether Nasser would be able to commit himself to the minimum conditions of peace that Israel would accept. An all-out effort for a general settlement would probably fail; we would therefore be wasting our political capital, exacerbating the pressures toward conflict and crippling our ability to contain a conflict if it erupted. It seemed to me that we would be better off focusing on a partial settlement, such as one with Jordan, [This judgment turned out to be wrong because the West Bank and Jerusalem were the toughest issues for Israel to handle.] which had a long and honorable record of friendship with the United States. I urged the President, if he proceeded, to obtain from State not only its procedural proposal but the outline of the substance of the peace terms it would be supporting—the articulation of which was, after all, the point of the exercise.

 

Nixon and I had a private talk on the afternoon of February 3. He felt himself “boxed in.” He could not reject the French proposal outright since that would mortgage his effort to improve relations with de Gaulle; also, he saw in the Middle East a lever to pry loose some Soviet cooperation on Vietnam. And he did not want to overrule the State Department on an issue on which its views were unanimous and so strongly held. Unfortunately, these objectives were not compatible. In my opinion, as I told him, we were more likely to obtain Soviet cooperation in Vietnam by moving deliberately in the Middle East, where the Soviet clients were the weaker party, than by relieving its embarrassment through talks that would give the Soviets a dazzling opportunity to demonstrate their utility to their Arab friends. Nor would we placate the bureaucracy by going along with its opening gambit; it was certain to be back with requests for more specific instructions that would head us down the slippery slope. If we were not careful, we would be asked to break every deadlock by putting forward our own plan—which we would then be asked to impose on recalcitrant parties.

 

Foreign policy decisions rarely emerge from abstract analysis, however. For reasons already described Nixon did not wish to overrule the State Department, antagonize de Gaulle, or rebuff the Soviet Union. Sensing this, I suggested a way to move without committing ourselves irrevocably. Rather than choose between the Four-Power and the Two- Power forums, we could maintain some freedom of action by accepting both. We would make progress in the Four-Power forum depend on exploratory talks with the Soviets. In this manner we could attempt to tie the Middle East discussions to our broader concerns, including Soviet help on Vietnam. And in the Four-Power forum, our European allies would be more hesitant to side with the Soviets against us if they knew we had our own bilateral option. To prevent the process from gaining uncontrollable momentum, we could insist that the President review the results of the exploratory talks before proceeding to formal discussions.

 

The President agreed. On February 3 I let Rogers and Sisco know of the decision. On February 5 the State Department, as instructed, announced that the United States regarded the French proposal “favorably” and that we would begin consultations with the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, bilaterally to develop “the measure of understanding “ that would make an early meeting of the Four “fruitful and constructive.”

 

My scheme did not work; it was too clever by half. I could spark planning exercises and try to deflect bureaucratic energies but I could not control the pace of the negotiations. The Department treated the White House tactical gimmickry as a sop to domestic politics and rushed to complete the “exploratory” talks as rapidly as possible. Within less than two weeks, I discovered that the State Department was already planning for the next move: developing substantive, comprehensive principles for a Middle East peace settlement—exactly what I had hoped to string out over many months.

 

As the pace of diplomacy quickened so did domestic excitement. Within a week of the announcement of our “favorable” attitude to Four-Power talks, Israel’s supporters reacted with the vigor I would come to know so well in the years to come. They reflected Israel’s own concern that outsiders not seek to substitute for direct talks with the Arabs. A delegation of six Congressmen, headed by Emanuel Celler of New York and representing the House leadership of both parties, called first on me and then on the President on February 13. They viewed the start of Four-Power talks as a sign that the United States was heading toward an imposed settlement; they deeply distrusted the forum and feared it would move us closer to French and Soviet views.

 

If there was already concern in the Congress over the negotiating forum, I could imagine the outcry once we turned to substance. The dramatic gulf between the two sides’ positions was demonstrated again by interviews granted by President Nasser of Egypt and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to an American news magazine.[93] The Egyptian demanded total Israeli withdrawal as the precondition for Arab fulfillment of the other provisions of Resolution 242. The Israeli made clear that Israel would not return to prewar lines under any terms, and that he had very specific ideas about the requirements for “peace.” The situation was further complicated by the death of Prime Minister Eshkol at the end of February, which meant that Israel faced the prospect of complicated election-year politics until Golda Meir, named Eshkol’s successor, received a fresh mandate in the elections scheduled for October.

 

This only reinforced my conviction that the time was not ripe for an active negotiation. And the resulting strategic disagreement was never really settled. The bureaucracy wanted to embark on substantive talks as rapidly as possible because it feared that a deteriorating situation would increase Soviet influence. I thought delay was on the whole in our interest because it enabled us to demonstrate even to radical Arabs that we were indispensable to any progress and that it could not be extorted from us by Soviet pressure. The State Department wanted to fuel the process of negotiations by accepting at least some of the Soviet ideas, to facilitate compromise. I wanted to frustrate the radicals—who were in any event hostile to us—by demonstrating that in the Middle East friendship with the United States was the precondition to diplomatic progress. When I told Sisco in mid-February that we did not want a quick success in the Four-Power consultations at the United Nations in New York, I was speaking a language that ran counter to all the convictions of his Department.

 

The Soviets, meanwhile, had quickly nibbled at our bait. At my very first meeting with Dobrynin on February 14, he told me that the Soviet leadership was prepared to talk bilaterally with us on the Middle East, preferably outside the UN framework. He repeated the same point during his first meeting with Nixon on February 17. Nixon evaded the offer of confidential bilateral talks on the Middle East at the White House level; he maintained his view that the Channel would be available only in return for cooperation on Vietnam.

 

The President’s talks in Europe on his trip in late February and early March 1969 added to the pressures on the United States to become actively involved. The British and French naturally wanted the main talks to take place in the Four-Power forum; they did not flatly object to parallel US-Soviet discussions but their enthusiasm for this procedure was well contained. De Gaulle observed with Olympian detachment that the United States and the Soviet Union could talk about anything they chose so long as they avoided the impression of a condominium. Beyond these procedural concerns—and de Gaulle’s general support for total Israeli withdrawal coupled with Four-Power guarantees—no European leader had a concrete idea of how to move the parties to a comprehensive agreement. They generously left such details to us.

 

By the beginning of March, then, foreign and bureaucratic pressures combined to generate irresistible momentum behind an active American role. Even in advance of the Presidential decision, Joe Sisco was already discussing with Dobrynin the virtues of Two-Power talks. Sisco’s enthusiasm was not a little influenced by the fact that he would conduct the Two-Power talks, while the Four-Power talks were under the aegis of Charles Yost, our Ambassador to the United Nations.

 

Dobrynin, somewhat confused, over lunch with me on March 3 pressed for clarification about the relation between the Two-Power talks, which he was eager to start, and the Four-Power forum. He tried to tantalize me by revealing that the Soviet Union was prepared to discuss a package deal, that is to say, a scheme requiring the simultaneous execution of all its provisions, in contrast to the prior Arab-Soviet demand that the process begin with Israeli withdrawal. He wanted to know in what forum to surface his plan; he indicated a preference to discuss some of the more delicate subjects, such as frontiers, in the White House Channel. Applying our strategy of using the Middle East as leverage on Vietnam—and conscious of Nixon’s reluctance to see me involved—I evaded the proposal; I encouraged Dobrynin to pursue his bilateral talks with Sisco.

 

The next day, March 4, it was the turn of the Israeli Ambassador to inquire into our purposes. Yitzhak Rabin had been a hero of Israel’s war of independence and as Chief of Staff of Israel’s defense forces he was an architect of the victory of the Six Day War. Except for his intelligence and tenacity, he was an unlikely ambassador. Taciturn, shy, reflective, almost resentful of small talk, Rabin possessed few of the attributes commonly associated with diplomacy. Repetitious people bored him and the commonplace offended him; unfortunately for Rabin both these qualities are not exactly in short supply in Washington. He hated ambiguity, which is the stuff of diplomacy. I grew extremely fond of him though he did little to encourage affection. His integrity and his analytical brilliance in cutting to the core of a problem were awesome. I valued his judgment, often even on matters unconnected with the Middle East, and trusted his motives even when his country’s positions were not always identical with our own. We became good friends and remained so through all the vicissitudes and squabbles that our duties occasionally imposed on us.

 

In that first conversation I could not answer his question about our policy; we had not yet settled on it ourselves. But I was reasonably certain that the President would proceed with both the Four- and Two- Power forums. My private advice was that Israel should prepare a concrete program articulating a definition of “peace” that it could live with; only this could give us criteria by which to judge progress.

 

As I feared, the momentum of negotiations rather than considered strategy drove the decisions. By early March Sisco reported the success I thought it wiser to postpone; he had now already fulfilled his first instructions and was asking for further guidance—which the Department had been working for two weeks to prepare, lest the President lose any time. In other words, less than a month after starting a “deliberate.” “exploratory” process, Sisco and his colleagues were about to propose to Nixon that we put forward substantive comprehensive principles.

 

The argument of the State Department now was exactly the opposite of that by which the explorations had been sold to the President. Whereas a month earlier it had been argued that the decision to open Four-Power talks implied no commitment as to substance, now it was claimed that the informal explorations could not be sustained except with some specific scheme such as a set of principles. Unless we put forth our ideas, it was claimed, we would be stuck with less balanced positions presented by the other three powers. And we had to do so quickly. The State Department urged that the scheduled mid-March visit by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban should be the deadline for Presidential decision. Eban was to be told that we planned to surface the document in the Four-Power forum and with the Soviets. The procedure I had devised in order to slow things down had been now fully exhausted in less than four weeks.

 

My views had not been changed by the events of the previous month. On March 5 I wrote to the President, summing up my concerns:

 

Everyone points out that we will be expected to deliver Israel in any negotiation. The Arabs assume—wrongly but irrevocably—that we can make Israel do what we wish. The French and British assume we could do more than we have. Perhaps only the Soviets—who know the limits of their own influence in Cairo and Damascus—realistically understand the limits of our influence in Jerusalem, but they find too much propaganda advantage in our support for Israel to admit the truth publicly.

 

Yet everyone also says that a settlement this year is unlikely, precisely because Israeli post-Eshkol and election-year politics will strictly limit Israel’s ability to compromise.

 

The arguments commonly made for trying the unlikely are that (1) trying in itself would be a stabilizing factor in the Mid-East and (2) arranging a settlement this year is the only way to undercut the militant Palestinians. But a situation can be posed in which (1) trying too hard could make matters worse than not making an all-out effort now and (2) a settlement could actually strengthen the Palestinians and weaken the Arab governments that accepted it.

 

Our dilemma was that if we pressured Israel we would give encouragement to Arab radicals and Soviet clients, who would see it as a vindication of their intransigence and of their Soviet connection; for the same reason such pressure could also drive Israel to extreme actions, or at least to dig in and concede nothing. If on the other hand we failed to press Israel, the blame for the deadlock would fall on us. In the event that Israel agreed to compromise terms, the Palestinians would then probably block a settlement, with Syrian and Iraqi support; a moderate Arab government that agreed to the settlement would come under assault from the radicals. Hussein and even Nasser could become vulnerable. The result would be not merely a failed negotiation but increasing chaos and a new danger of war. In other words, given the influence and intransigence of the Soviets, the militance of Nasser, and the power of the fedayeen, I argued, the Middle East was not ready for a comprehensive American initiative.

 

The State Department came up with a paper of “general principles” which led precisely in that direction. It asserted that the object of negotiations was a binding contractual agreement, though not necessarily a peace treaty. Face-to-face talks were “not essential” in the early phase but would probably have to occur “at some point.” The principles allowed minimal changes from preexisting borders, but such changes “should not reflect the weight of conquest.” (The language about “the weight of conquest” was a State Department euphemism for insisting on near-total Israeli withdrawal; it had appeared earlier in a speech by President Johnson on September 10, 1968.) The clear assumption behind the principles was that, while the UN’s Gunnar Jarring was to take the lead, with the Four-Power and Two-Power talks “backstopping” him, in the last analysis the effort could work only if the United States exercised its full leverage over Israel. An earlier version of State’s general principles paper insisted on Israeli withdrawal to the prewar line with Egypt and Jordan, except for minor border rectifications only in the case of Jordan. On this provision, I did manage to soften State’s principles in a session with Sisco, though an Israeli explosion was certain anyway.

 

On March 10, Nixon approved the State Department recommendation that the general principles paper be presented to Eban during his visit; then the paper would be discussed point by point between Sisco and Dobrynin and submitted to the Four-Power forum as the basis for consultations there. Nixon indicated to me that he shared my skepticism about what could come of it, but he said it would give State something to do, while we handled Vietnam, SALT, Europe, and China in the White House. (It is not to be excluded that he gave Rogers an opposite explanation.) Rogers proudly unveiled the new approach in public testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 27, telling the Senators that it was “a direct interest of the United States to exercise whatever influence it has, in whatever way would be useful and effective…” Calling for “secure and recognized boundaries” and a “contractually binding,” state of peace, Rogers added the crucial formula: “In our view rectifications from the preexisting lines should be confined to those required for mutual security and should not reflect the weight of conquest.”

 

Sisco’s talks with Dobrynin stretched over nine sessions between March 18 and April 22 and followed predictable lines. The only topic discussed was the American general principles paper, with Dobrynin pressing Sisco to be more specific. Being more specific in this context meant spelling out a firmer position on issues such as final borders, which could only provoke an uproar in Israel by making it obvious that we had moved closer to the Soviet-Egyptian insistence on total withdrawal. We presented the general principles to the Four Powers on March 24 with the same result. Once again the American position was the focus of debate, with our allies seeking to nudge us into a greater effort. “Greater effort” had the same operational meaning as being “more specific.” We were being jockeyed from position to position, endlessly asked to modify our positions in order to rescue a negotiation that we ourselves had started presumably in order to ease pressures on us.

 

At the end of March, I sent an interim report about the Two-Power talks to the President:

 

While we have so far avoided the worst dangers of an unprepared position, the whole burden of the talks could still fall on us—for producing all the substantive proposals and for bringing the Israelis around… A good definition of an equitable settlement is one that will make both sides unhappy. If so, we must have Soviet help, and the Soviets must share the blame for pushing an unpalatable solution.

 

We had already separated ourselves from Israel’s position; the Soviets had not reciprocated by differentiating their position in any way from the Arabs’. Before we took new steps, I reiterated, we needed to develop an agreed United States position on the terms of a final settlement, on the tactics of producing it, on how to relate the Two- and Four- Power talks, and on how to coordinate both of them with Jarring. Otherwise, the entire exercise would end in confusion.

 

All these procedural maneuverings would not spare us from the necessity to hear the view of the parties themselves—a process bound to bring us starkly into contact with reality once again.

 

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Middle East Visitors

 

he first to be heard from was the eloquent Abba Eban, who arrived in Washington in the middle of March for talks at the White House and State Department. I had met Eban socially in Israel when he was Minister of Education; this was my first professional contact with him. I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker’s virtuosity. The prose flowed evenly, without high points, rustling along inexorably like a clear mountain stream. To interrupt seemed almost unthinkable, for one knew that one would have to do so in an idiom that seemed barbaric by comparison. No American or British personality ever reminded me so acutely that English was for me, after all, an acquired language.

 

Eban’s eloquence—unfortunately for those who had to negotiate with him—was allied to a first-class intelligence and fully professional grasp of diplomacy. He was always well prepared; he knew what he wanted. He practiced to the full his maxim that anything less than one hundred percent agreement with Israel’s point of view demonstrated lack of objectivity. Even a most sympathetic position—say ninety percent—was deplored as “erosion.” “weakening,” or “loss of nerve.” I was not always sure whether Eban’s more matter-of-fact colleagues in Jerusalem appreciated his eloquence as much as I did; his Prime Minister seemed occasionally to bypass him in favor of more uNorthodox channels. But I was hardly in a strong moral position to object to channels that bypassed a Foreign Minister.

 

Eban took vigorous exception to the very concept of Four-Power and Two-Power talks, on the ground that the deck would be stacked against Israel in either group. Eban stressed the one Israeli demand that he calculated was least likely to be met by the Arabs: the insistence on direct negotiations and Arab signatures on a joint peace treaty. A signed peace treaty was essential, he explained, because of the special reverence that the Arabs had always shown for written promises. I did not move him by suggesting that in my admittedly inadequate reading of Arab history I had found no greater or lesser adherence to signed treaties than in any other part of the world.

 

Eban was too shrewd to waste time debating history with me, however. He had a long meeting with Secretary Rogers on March 13 in the course of which he was shown the general principles paper, rejected it, and asked that it not be submitted. Eban objected strongly to our formulations regarding borders. It seemed to prejudge what Israel insisted could be negotiated only between the parties. Lest we grow too self- confident about any other portion of our principles paper, Eban rejected the notion of big-power guarantees as well. By “globalizing” every event in the Middle East, he said, we would turn the area into another Berlin. Egypt was not ready for the kind of peace Israel required; he was convinced the Soviet presence in Egypt made it increasingly unlikely that Nasser would be flexible. A negotiation with Jordan, less immoderate and free of Soviet influence, was more hopeful.

 

In the final analysis. Eban saw nothing intolerable in the status quo. Israel much preferred that the United States avoid an active role and let Jarring pursue his course. Israel was ostensibly willing to negotiate but profoundly pessimistic about prospects for a comprehensive settlement. This meant that there was no way of pursuing the course we had set for ourselves without a massive clash with Israel.

 

The next visitors were Arab. They were no more tractable.

 

When former President Eisenhower died on March 28, Nasser designated Mahmoud Fawzi, his foreign affairs adviser, to attend the funeral as Egypt’s representative. Fawzi’s presence to honor a leader of a country with which Egypt had no diplomatic relations was a mark of particular respect and courtesy. Fawzi was a fine gentleman, a professional with the ingratiating manner of the educated Egyptian and the weary air of one who had seen much of man’s foibles. Because I considered Egypt as a Soviet client state, I did not take advantage of establishing the closer human contact that the opportunity afforded. In the light of my later experience I have regretted this.

 

Fawzi’s visit came after nearly a decade and a half of eroding relations between Egypt and the United States. During the transition, Nasser had sent a rambling letter to the President-elect listing his grievances against the United States but hinting that in the right circumstances he would be prepared to resume relations. This had also been Nasser’s theme when Governor Scranton visited Cairo in early December; Egypt wanted to resume ties but would like to have a more favorable American Middle East policy for a pretext. Throughout early 1969 Nasser repeated the request for an American gesture to break the ice. Holding up the sale of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel was one of his ideas; it was unlikely to commend itself to Israel. Though it seemed to me that Nasser overrated the boon he would confer on us by resuming diplomatic relations, I wrote Nixon in March that we had already taken several of the steps Nasser had suggested (if for different reasons). We had conducted an active diplomacy; we had put forward general principles; Rogers had stated a forthcoming position on frontiers before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The basis for a possible rapprochement between Washington and Cairo seemed to exist.

 

Against this backdrop I had two meetings with Fawzi preparatory to his call on Nixon on April 11. But it soon transpired that Fawzi had no authority to resume diplomatic relations. He would report our reaction to Cairo; relations could be resumed only if there was some concrete advance; he did not spell out what he meant by that phrase. Egypt was eager to make progress partly because the Soviets were pressing it in the direction of peace, he said. They seemed to understand that they would not be able to help their Arab friends any other way; in a stalemate Soviet standing in the Arab world was bound to deteriorate.

 

Fawzi’s last point was, of course, precisely the strategic opportunity I perceived for the United States. If the Soviet position in Egypt was bound to deteriorate the longer a settlement was delayed, we had no incentive whatever to accept the first Soviet or Egyptian offer, especially as long as the Soviet Union maintained large forces in Egypt and Egyptian diplomacy took its lead from Moscow. The terms offered by Fawzi were not likely to inspire optimism in any event. Egypt refused to sign a joint document with Israel; its obligations would run only to the Security Council (where the Soviet Union had a veto); it would not establish diplomatic relations with Israel; UN peacekeeping forces could be removed upon six months’ notice. These positions would never suffice to bring about the full Israeli withdrawal Egypt demanded.

 

Fawzi urbanely assured Nixon on April 11 that Egypt was eager to reduce its military expenditures and devote its resources to domestic construction. He did not ask the United States to press Israel to do things against its interests; he did request even-handed treatment for Egypt. As for resuming relations, the time was not yet ripe, he said.

 

To this day I have not understood Nasser’s motives. For months he had conveyed urgent signals pointing in the direction of resumption of relations. He sent Fawzi, known as a conciliator, to Washington. Fawzi conducted himself capably, but on that crucial issue his instructions, to his obvious discomfiture, did not permit him to budge. It was never clear how Nasser thought Nixon could brave domestic opposition, Israeli refusals, and Soviet aloofness to support the maximum goals of a country that refused diplomatic relations with us and whose foreign policy remained fundamentally unfriendly. Nasser, in effect, sought to deal with us by blackmail but had nothing to threaten us with. When later in the year the Administration put forward precise plans on both the Egyptian and Jordanian borders along lines previously declared acceptable by Nasser, he refused either to accept them or to resume relations. He gloried in his radicalism, which he thought essential to his Pan-Arab ambitions, and for this he must have felt compelled to remain in perpetual confrontation with us in the Middle East and the Third World, even at the cost of jeopardizing our willingness to move in his direction.

 

I have no doubt that the United States would have pursued the peace process more energetically early in the Nixon Administration had Nasser been more flexible. The principal obstacles to a more active American role were Nasser’s anti-American foreign policy and the predominant role of the Soviet Union in Cairo. Fawzi was not in a position to reassure us that these did not represent fixed principles of Egyptian policy. Instead, with all his charm, Fawzi on Nasser’s instructions calmly insisted on having everything for nothing: US support against Israel, Soviet support against the United States, and leadership of the radical movements throughout the Third World. Foreign policy does not work that way. Nasser could not make the choice between his rhetorical ambitions and his intuition of the limits of Egypt’s ability to achieve those ambitions. He died without ever making the choice. Only his great successor, Anwar Sadat, would put the pieces together.

 

The failure of the Fawzi mission affected another Arab visitor, the doughty King Hussein of Jordan, who had never bargained about his friendship with the United States. Hussein was one of the most attractive political leaders I have met. The little King—as he was affectionately called by our officials—stoutly defended the Arab cause even when his Arab brethren failed to reciprocate his loyalty. Once I knew him reasonably well I could measure his irritation at what he considered insensitivity or bureaucratic pedantry by the heightening of his legendary courtesy; his use of the honorific “sir” would multiply while he assumed a glacial demeanor. (He, an hereditary monarch, called me “sir” even when I was a mere Presidential Assistant.)

 

He was as gallant as he was polite. Once he piloted my wife Nancy and me in his helicopter on a hair-raising ride at treetop level. To get him to fly higher, Nancy said innocently that she did not know helicopters could fly so low. The King assured her that they could fly lower still, making the rest of the trip almost on the deck. Had he exploited the opportunity he could have obtained my agreement to any political demand by promising to fly higher.

 

Hussein sought with dignity and courage to reconcile the roles of Arab nationalist and America’s friend. A pro-Western monarch in the vortex of Arab radicalism, he maintained his independence as well as the respect of rulers in the region who were less than enchanted by the dynastic principle. Though substantially dependent on American aid he put up with our cumbersome and sometimes humiliating procedures, never losing his composure or patience but also never descending to the role of supplicant. He was the first Arab leader prepared to talk of making peace with Israel, maintaining an intermittent if fruitless contact with Jerusalem. It was a misfortune that the strength of Hussein’s bargaining position did not match his moderation and that his available options were not equal to his goodwill. He thus had the capacity neither for independent action nor for blackmail, which are the stuff of Middle Eastern politics. In 1969, the fedayeen of the Palestine Liberation Organization formed a state within his state but did not deflect him from his moderate course; months later (as we shall see in Chapter XV) he courageously and decisively confronted their challenge to his authority.

 

In his meeting with Nixon on April 8, Hussein, speaking also on behalf of Nasser, stressed that both leaders were committed to Security Council Resolution 242 and were prepared to sign any document with Israel except a peace treaty. Hussein recognized the need for some minor border rectifications. If Israel would cede Gaza to Jordanian rule, the rectifications on the West Bank could be fairly substantial. (It seems unfortunate, in retrospect, that there was not more exploration of a separate Jordan-Israel arrangement involving a swap of Gaza for West Bank territories.) Hussein asserted that both Nasser and he were willing to consider demilitarized zones and free access through the Suez Canal as well as the Strait of Tiran. The pressure of Arab extremists was “eager” to resume ties with the United States. But the conciliatory impact of these remarks was largely vitiated by Fawzi’s talks with me and his disappointing meeting with Nixon three days later, as already described.

 

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Diplomacy: Ever-New Proposals

 

he deadlock between the Middle East parties inevitably reflected itself in the Four- and the Two-Power talks. The solution that seemed obvious to our interlocutors in those talks was to throw us into the fray to impose a peace. On April 14 Dobrynin told me that the Two-Power exercise needed more concrete propositions, particularly on frontiers. What the Soviets and Arabs wanted was to get us to make specific the implication of our vague formulations about “minor rectifications” and the “weight of conquest,” that is, an explicit insistence that Israeli withdrawal be total. Assuring me of Soviet eagerness to help promote a settlement, Dobrynin suggested we try a joint US-Soviet proposal; if the United States came up with more specific positions on each of the principles, the Soviets would then sell them to the Arabs. Since Dobrynin in effect was asking us to accept the Arab program, it was not clear what he proposed to “sell” to them. To me it seemed that he was looking to obtain credit in the Arab world for what would amount to a peace imposed by us on Israel. We were being pressed in the same direction in the Four-Power forum as well. De Gaulle, who had honored President Eisenhower by attending the memorial services himself, had told Nixon on March 31 that the Four should try to agree on common terms for a settlement. Yet we knew from our consultations in New York that each of the participants had his own idea of what those terms should be—and that none was acceptable to Israel. In each forum we were being asked to impose a peace, for which we needed no forum. This was precisely the outcome I had predicted.

 

At home, a majority of both Houses of Congress rallied to support Israel’s position in a public declaration: direct negotiations, a contractual peace, and no pressure on Israel to withdraw prematurely. As in Vietnam, we would wind up negotiating with ourselves.

 

Not surprisingly, the more inconclusive the negotiations in March and April 1969, the more intense was the military confrontation on the ground. As violence spiraled, U Thant warned on April 22 that a “virtual state of active war” existed along the Suez Canal; a Cairo spokesman declared the 1967 cease-fire on that front void. Clashes mounted as Israel retaliated against fedayeen attacks from Jordan; Lebanon declared a state of emergency in the futile attempt to halt fedayeen raids into Israel from its territory. What came to be called the “war of attrition” was proceeding in earnest.

 

In other words, after two months of a new US initiative, we were more or less back at the starting point. We had proved again what we already knew: The parties had vastly different views about the meaning of secure and recognized frontiers, the timing and extent of withdrawals, the nature of recognition, and indeed the process of negotiation.

 

Another policy review was clearly necessary.

 

What had started in February as an exploration to determine the feasibility of negotiations had by May evolved into the proposition that the United States had an obligation to save the negotiations by producing new and increasingly specific proposals. But there was no getting around the fact that each side’s propositions were totally unacceptable to the other. The parties could not be maneuvered by artful procedures into abandoning positions they had held and fought for in three wars over twenty years. The yawning gulf between them could be bridged only by formulations so ambiguous that they would simply repeat the evasions of Security Council Resolution 242.

 

In these circumstances, the vital question for us was not what general proposals we would make but whether we were prepared to insist—by pressure if necessary—that our proposals be carried out. Until we had answered this question—which meant, as the proposals were framed, pressure on Israel—the negotiation was bound to stalemate one way or another. If we stuck to our vague positions, the Four- and Two-Power talks would collapse, with the blame falling on the United States. If we were specific we would be in a major brawl with Israel without gaining the friendship of the Arabs. On the contrary, the Soviet Union and its clients would be the major beneficiaries. And if we shied away from pressing Israel, for either domestic or foreign policy reasons, the negotiation would again grind to a halt. To me, this was the inevitable consequence of attempting a comprehensive settlement when the parties’ positions were so far apart, the Soviets supported the Arab position, and we had not yet maneuvered to a mediator’s role.

 

Rogers argued that putting forth a detailed plan would improve our position even if it were rejected; there was, according to him, simply no way of knowing whether a settlement was possible without testing Egyptian, Soviet, and Israeli views. Therefore, the State Department now submitted for Presidential approval the draft of a detailed peace settlement between Egypt and Israel, based on the pre-June 5, 1967, lines. A draft of a Jordan-Israel peace agreement would follow shortly.

 

I expressed strong reservations to the President. I predicted that the scheme would probably lead to a blowup with both sides. The borders were certain to be unacceptable to Israel, and the Arabs, in Nasser’s current frame of mind, were not ready to make the necessary commitment to peace. It would not improve our relations with the Arabs; it would strengthen the position of the Soviets; the Soviets and their clients would first get credit for having pushed us this far and then accuse us of not going far enough and not delivering Israel on what we had promised.

 

These issues were debated before the President at an NSC meeting on the morning of April 25. The President, torn between the warnings in my memoranda and the pressures of his bureaucracy, avoided a decision. Instead, he asked me afterward to work with Sisco on modifying the State proposal to mitigate the dangers I had foreseen. The paper, as revised, was approved by the President on May 5. The changes were mostly cosmetic. It was known that the President was not prepared flatly to overrule his Secretary of State on the Middle East; hence, my influence was weak. In the new version the United States would not present an overall plan for an Egyptian-Israeli settlement all at once; rather, its provisions would be put forward piecemeal in successive talks between Sisco and Dobrynin. Second, the United States would not commit itself initially to push for full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai; rather, the formulation on boundaries would be left ambiguous, with withdrawal to the prewar line “not necessarily excluded.” These changes could only delay—they could not arrest—the State Department steamroller; once the President had authorized the ultimate position it was certain to be put forward one way or the other.

 

This was all the more true because Joe Sisco did not believe in leisurely negotiations. As soon as the President had approved the revised strategy, he began his second round of talks with Dobrynin. He did not waste time; he started on May 6 and finished by June 9. Sisco briskly doled out the United States positions on the key issues. It soon became apparent that the Soviets were not about to accept them and would inevitably ask for more. For example, we insisted on direct Arab- Israeli negotiations at some stage. Dobrynin wanted to downplay this. On borders, we maintained that “the former international boundary between Egypt and the mandated territory of Palestine is not necessarily excluded.” The Soviet Union demanded total withdrawal to the prewar lines without change. We favored demilitarization of the entire Sinai; the Soviets did not. We insisted on free navigation through international waterways such as the Strait of Tiran and the Suez Canal while the Soviets hedged their position by references to the Constantinople Convention of 1888 whose import was ambiguous when applied to current circumstances. There were also differences over the refugee issue. On June 11, Dobrynin complained to me about the new deadlock; he lamented Sisco’s lack of precision, particularly his “abstract” formulation on borders, as Dobrynin called it (which at least demonstrated to me that Joe was staying within instructions).

 

All this time, Israel made clear in its inimitable way that its unhappiness with the new American initiative was mounting, even as Dobrynin was attacking our formulas from the Arab side. On May 13 Ambassador Rabin inquired into the purpose of this new US-Soviet dialogue and expressed special concern that we might yield on the border issue. He criticized other provisions as well. Israel still preferred direct negotiations with the Arabs. Prime Minister Golda Meir sent an impassioned letter to President Nixon reiterating her concern that the United States was prejudicing the negotiations by predetermining the outcome on the main issues. To prevent the situation from getting out of hand, Rabin suggested that Mrs. Meir be invited to Washington at an early date. We were not ready for an immediate encounter. I secured an invitation from the President for Mrs. Meir to visit in the fall.

 

New fighting punctuated the diplomatic sparring. In May, June, and July, the Middle East exploded daily with fedayeen raids from Jordan and aerial combat over the Egyptian and Syrian fronts; Mrs. Meir promised that Israeli reprisals would be swift and severe, repaying “sevenfold” the Arab attacks on Israel. In May, Nasser told Time magazine that a settlement was possible if Israel agreed to total withdrawal and to giving Palestinians the choice of return—both of which Israel had already rejected. In the same interview he also said that he accepted the “reality” of Israel, but he demonstrated his ambivalence by ordering that sentence omitted from the Cairo media account of his interview. Then, in a major speech on July 23, Nasser seemed to reverse himself again; he now proclaimed that Egypt was passing into the “stage of liberation” in its war with Israel, and condemned the United States and Britain for supporting Israel. Meanwhile, on June 13 Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko ended a Cairo visit with a communiqué that pledged full Soviet support for Egypt’s struggle to “liquidate the consequences of aggression.”

 

On June 17, the Soviet Union finally gave us a counterproposal. The Soviet reply had some positive elements: it talked of working for a binding agreement and of recognition of Israel. But it showed little flexibility on the major issues that concerned us most: Direct negotiations were not mentioned; final borders must rigidly follow the 1967 lines: freedom of navigation was left vague; the definition of final peace omitted any obligation to control the guerrillas; and it refused to embrace the proposition that Israel should have some control over which Palestinians returned to Israel.

 

Rogers, nevertheless, decided that the Soviet reply showed enough “forward movement” to warrant another American proposal. Since Dobrynin had returned home for consultations, Rogers proposed on June 30 that Joe Sisco travel to Moscow to present some new ideas. Specifically, Rogers wanted Sisco to be authorized in Moscow, at his own discretion as a fallback position, to play our “trump card”—an explicit commitment to the prewar frontiers—if the Soviets were forthcoming on the issues of peace, security, and direct negotiations.

 

This I thought premature, to put it kindly. In my view, the Soviet reply reflected no significant concession. Basically, it sought to extract the total Arab program from us by subtly evasive and substantially unyielding formulas. It showed no willingness to match our leverage on Israel with similar pressure on the Arabs. It seemed designed for the overriding purpose of demonstrating the Soviet Union’s indispensability to its Arab clients. If we went along, a blowup with Israel was inevitable. Nevertheless, I was not in a position to stop Rogers’s initiative. I recommended to the President that he go along with the Sisco trip so long as we offered no new concession on borders. I advised the President: “I would not at this stage give him authority to commit us in any way to the fallback language. That puts us too far ahead of Israel and gives away our position without any return. I think the Russians—not we—should be setting the bait.” My proposed strategy was to insist that the Soviet Union pay a price with its Arab friends commensurate to what we were expected to pay with Israel. This would both ensure a fairer negotiation and put some strains on the Soviet-Egyptian relationship. Nixon agreed; Sisco was authorized to go to Moscow but not to carry with him any new position on borders.

 

Sisco visited Moscow from July 14 to 17. His discussions were a replay of the exchanges of the previous two months. Even he returned skeptical about Soviet flexibility and intentions. He reported to the President that he found no evidence that the Soviets were prepared to press Nasser on the key issues of peace and direct negotiations. They viewed Nasser as their primary instrument in the Middle East; they were unwilling to risk either his political position or their influence with him by urging him to make peace on terms other than his own. Instead of pressing Nasser, their strategy seemed to be to sit tight and erode our position to a point where we were prepared to impose their terms on Israel. Sisco concluded, correctly in my view, that we, too, should sit tight.

 

The Sisco mission stilled the impulse for initiatives for exactly two months. Although for the moment the White House and State Department were in rare accord on doing nothing, diplomatic activity could be expected to resume in the fall. The arrival of foreign dignitaries, including the parties to the Middle East dispute, for the United Nations General Assembly would generate the incentive as well as the opportunity to try again.

 

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Yet Another Initiative

 

his was particularly true since in August, fighting flared up again on all fronts, especially dangerously along the Suez Canal. It was not calmed by the burning of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a deranged Australian. The Arabs predictably blamed Israel; both Nasser and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia called for a holy war to liberate Jerusalem. Terrorists hijacked a TWA jetliner to Damascus where Israeli passengers were held for several weeks. Israel’s Labour Party, gearing up for the fall elections, proclaimed its intention of keeping parts of the occupied territories whatever the peace terms.

 

This grim scene called for another policy review. It took the usual form of State’s pressing for an initiative and my urging the prior elaboration of a precise strategy. Gromyko was coming to the UN General Assembly; Rogers and our UN Ambassador Charles Yost asked Nixon for permission to present the American endorsement of the 1967 frontiers, conditional on satisfactory security arrangements. Sisco took a more cautious position.

 

These pressures illustrate what I take to be a basic maxim of US foreign policymaking. Once a fallback position exists—however hedged with qualifications—it will be put forward one way or the other, first by private comments and press leaks and ultimately as a formal position. A President who authorizes a fallback position in the expectation that he may never face its consequences is bound to be disappointed. The very existence of a fallback erodes the tenacity with which the approved position is maintained. And the process is accelerated if bureaucratic prerogatives and individual egos are committed to the fallback position and its expectations of success.

 

Therefore the by now familiar debate took place yet again, this time at an NSC meeting on September 11. The State Department representatives argued that without our putting forward the fallback position, progress was impossible (an argument which if pushed far enough would eventually lead us squarely to the Soviet position on every issue). I questioned the wisdom of a proposal that would certainly be rejected by Israel and that might not even be accepted by Egypt, hedged as it was by conditions of peace already rebuffed. In the next round, having committed ourselves to this course, we would be inevitably pressured to soften our position even further and then to impose it on Israel.

 

We were back to the strategic controversy with which we had started in February. The advocates of further concessions argued that time was working against us; the longer the deadlock lasted, the more our position in the Arab world would deteriorate. I stressed that the opposite was true. A continuing deadlock was in our interest; it would persuade Egypt to face the reality that Soviet tutelage and a radical foreign policy were obstacles to progress and that only the United States could bring about a settlement; it would demonstrate Soviet impotence and in time might impel a fundamental reconstruction of Arab, and especially of Egyptian, foreign policies. Rogers saw in the Two-Power talks a device by which the Soviet Union would help us out of our Middle East predicament. I thought it was the Soviets that faced a predicament, since they had no means of achieving their objectives except by our cooperation or through a war their clients stood to lose. If we stayed calm, they would sooner or later have to pay a price for our help, either in the Middle East or elsewhere. Rogers was concerned that the United States might be isolated in the Four-Power talks; my view was that this was inherent in the forum and could not be avoided by clever formulas.

 

Before the September 11 NSC meeting the President had brought John Mitchell into the discussions to advise him on the domestic politics of the choices before him. Mitchell, in spite of his gruff, pipe-smoking exterior and his later fate, was a man of discretion and shrewdness. Nixon valued his political judgment; he played the detached observer and protector of the President’s interests, and he proved his insight on many occasions. Now Mitchell warned Nixon of the domestic buzz saw he was facing—the inevitable brawl with Israel, with no hope of achieving peace.

 

Nixon was thus well prepared for the NSC meeting and probed Rogers and Sisco sharply. “Do you fellows ever talk to the Israelis?” he asked. How did they think Israel was going to react to our accepting the 1967 borders? Rogers and Sisco assured him that the Israelis would be happy with the total package since it would include elements of their own definition of peace. I questioned this, pointing out that if I was right and we were not prepared to pressure Israel, we would lose with the Arabs by adding the charge of impotence to that of ill will. The President decided to keep our negotiations “exploratory” until Mrs. Meir’s visit; in the meantime he ordered a study of the settlement terms for Jordan and Syria as well as Egypt. The NSC process might not be taken seriously as a device to produce options; it had a great advantage in providing an excuse for delaying decisions.

 

Mitchell told me afterward that the President had no preconceived notions on how to proceed. Nixon told me a few weeks later that he agreed with me that it would be best to delay specific proposals to see what tensions might develop between the Soviets and the Egyptians: “The summit and trade they [Moscow] can have but I‘ll be damned if they can get the Middle East.” Rogers and Sisco were therefore instructed to say nothing new in their talks with Gromyko.

 

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Golda Meir

 

olda Meir came to Washington on September 25 on her first trip to the United States as Israeli Prime Minister. She was an original. Her childhood in the Russia of pogroms and her youth as a pioneer in the harshness of Palestine had taught her that only the wary are given the opportunity to survive and only those who fight succeed in that effort. Her craggy face bore witness to the destiny of a people that had come to know too well the potentialities of man’s inhumanity. Her watchful eyes made clear that she did not propose that those she led should suffer the same fate without a struggle. Yet she yearned to see her people realize their dream of peace; her occasionally sarcastic exterior never obscured a compassion that felt the death of every Israeli soldier as the loss of a member of her family. She was a founder of her country. Every inch of land for which Israel had fought was to her a token of her people’s survival; it would be stubbornly defended against enemies; it would be given up only for a tangible guarantee of security. She had a penetrating mind, leavened by earthiness and a mischievous sense of humor. She was not taken in by elevated rhetoric, or particularly interested in the finer points of negotiating tactics. She cut to the heart of the matter. She answered pomposity with irony and dominated conversations by her personality and shrewd psychology. To me she acted as a benevolent aunt toward an especially favored nephew, so that even to admit the possibility of disagreement was a challenge to family hierarchy producing emotional outrage. It was usually calculated. My wife is fond of saying that some of the most dramatic theatrical performances she witnessed were between Golda Meir and me when we disagreed. Mrs. Meir treated Secretary Rogers as if the reports of his views could not possibly be true; she was certain that once he had a chance to explain himself the misunderstandings caused by the inevitable inadequacy of reporting telegrams would vanish; she then promised forgiveness. As for Nixon, Mrs. Meir hailed him as an old friend of the Jewish people, which was startling news to those of us more familiar with Nixon’s ambivalences on that score. But it gave him a reputation to uphold. And in the event he did much for Israel if not out of affection then out of his characteristically unsentimental calculation of the national interest.

 

Her themes with Nixon were simple. The United States should not let Nasser avoid the responsibility for making peace by getting others to settle the terms; the Soviet Union had to know that the United States would not permit Israel to be destroyed; the Arabs had to understand that Israel was not weak. Only this would bring peace.

 

Nixon had not reached eminence, however, by being taken in by generalities. While he was restless with State Department steamroller tactics, he did not believe for a moment that peace would come automatically if we only held firm. He was not yet ready to press Israel, largely for domestic reasons, and he had no difficulty giving Golda Meir assurances of assistance against a Soviet attack. And he favored a strong Israel because he did not want the United States to have to fight Israel’s battles—which was exactly Mrs. Meir’s view as well. Nixon thought that Nasser would become more moderate only if faced by overwhelming power.

 

But he still had before him the policy recommendations of his Secretary of State; he could therefore scarcely promise that the United States would never advance new peace terms. He stalled, giving the impression that he was more sympathetic to Israeli concerns than his bureaucracy—which was true—and coming up with the formula that he would trade “hardware for software.” This meant that he would be responsive to Israeli requests for armaments if Israel gave us some latitude in negotiations, which he strongly implied he would ensure would not amount to much.

 

It would be too much to claim that Mrs. Meir agreed; more accurate to say she acquiesced in a formulation whose meaning only the future would reveal. She reserved her right to do battle then, if necessary, and she would choose as her adversary someone lower in the hierarchy than the President. As it turned out she had occasion to do battle soon enough. The “hardware for software” formula the President had proposed was leaked to the press—in a way which implied that arms aid would thereafter be conditional on Israeli flexibility in negotiations. Mrs. Meir’s outraged protests were targeted (probably correctly) on the State Department (which had been given a summary of the Presidential conversation with Mrs. Meir).

 

A serious bureaucratic battle was looming. On September 27 Dobrynin called on me with the perennial Soviet suggestion of a joint US- Soviet position, this time to provide guidelines for Jarring, the UN Special Representative. I rejected the overture with the argument that as long as the Soviets were so unhelpful on Vietnam, joint action elsewhere would be “difficult.” I had no intention to act jointly with the Soviet Union when the Soviets clearly expected to get a free ride on our exertions. But my rebuff merely sent Dobrynin back into other channels. He continued intensive talks with Sisco in September and October. Picking up threads of the Moscow visit, Sisco and Dobrynin mulled over the various provisions of a possible Egyptian-Israeli settlement. By October 14, Sisco was reporting that there was enough progress on procedures (such as holding indirect talks, as Ralph Bunche had conducted twenty years earlier on the isle of Rhodes) to warrant moving ahead to the issue of boundaries the following week.

 

I had my doubts about this “progress.” I thought the Soviets were using the Middle East, like SALT, to make Nixon think twice about his threatened November 1 “deadline” over Vietnam (see Chapter VIII). My concerns were not eased by the meeting between Dobrynin and the President on October 20. Dobrynin read from an aide-mémoire, putting all the blame for the Middle East impasse squarely on Washington. Nixon replied sharply, pointing out that the Soviets had been totally inflexible on Israeli withdrawal without indicating any sacrifice they would ask from Egypt; the Soviet client had lost the war, had lost the territory, and was in no position to be making demands.

 

While Nixon was facing down Dobrynin, Sisco was angling for authority to tell Dobrynin about our fallback position accepting the 1967 frontier linked to security guarantees. He wanted to move ahead at a meeting scheduled for October 28. I discussed this with the President, who agreed there should be no American initiatives of any kind before the November 1 Vietnam deadline. Nixon had, in fact, given a flat order that there be no further contacts at all with the Soviets until he had given his major November 3 speech on Vietnam. Sisco protested, because Rogers had already promised Gromyko that Sisco and Dobrynin would meet on October 28. (This was hardly a conclusive argument, since Sisco could always have stalled.) But Nixon was so absorbed with Vietnam, preparing his November 3 speech and dealing with the Moratorium, that he had even less stomach than usual for a fight with his Secretary of State. He yielded reluctantly. Characteristically, he sought to hedge his bets by asking John Mitchell and Leonard Garment—counselor to the President and adviser on Jewish affairs—to let Jewish community leaders know his doubts about State’s diplomacy. Nixon implied strongly to them that he would see to it that nothing came of the very initiatives he was authorizing.

 

We were in the anomalous position of Nixon’s leaning toward my strategy but going along with Rogers’s tactics. The reasons for his relative deference to Rogers on Middle East policy are those I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Nixon understood well enough that the diplomacy would go nowhere; whenever it threatened a blowup he would usually follow my advice to abort it. And the final irony was that the resulting policy of fits and starts, of tantalizing initiatives later aborted, was the functional equivalent of what I wanted to achieve by design: to put us into the pivotal position in the negotiations and to demonstrate Soviet inability to produce progress.

 

Until this demonstration had been made, there was no gain for the United States in pursuing an active policy. Occasionally Nixon was tempted to impose a settlement. On one of my memoranda in late 1969, informing him of King Hussein’s pessimism about peace prospects in the face of Israel’s tough stand, Nixon wrote in longhand: “I am beginning to think we have to consider taking strong steps unilaterally to save Israel from her own destruction.” But on further consideration he always stopped short, because in 1969 the beneficiaries of such a course would have been the Soviet Union and Soviet clients vociferously hostile to us.

 

On October 28 Sisco at last presented to Dobrynin the fallback position that State had been itching to put forward—committing the United States to the 1967 international boundary between Israel and Egypt. It included provisions on peace and security arrangements that State, without definite proof, gambled would be attractive enough to persuade Israel to withdraw and to convince the Soviets to press Egypt. Both hopes were to be disappointed.

 

Contrary to State’s prediction, our offer evoked only a noncommittal Soviet response, and contrary to what Nasser had led us to believe earlier, accepting the prewar frontiers did not improve our relations with him. Instead, he made a fiery speech to his National Assembly on November 6 declaring that he would reclaim the occupied territories by “fire and blood” instead of political “half-solutions,” and accusing the United States of military involvement on Israel’s behalf. So extreme was this Nasser outburst that, in a rare move, the State Department issued a rebuttal calling Nasser’s position a “setback” to peace. Not long afterward Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad termed our peace plan (including its new line on borders) “even worse” than previous proposals. Even more predictable was the Israeli attitude. The concessions on the definition of peace, which were supposed to gain Israel’s acquiescence, were brushed aside. Israel protested in the strongest diplomatic terms against our putting forward specific formulations on frontiers. American supporters of Israel expressed alarm. And the fighting escalated yet again, especially along the Suez Canal. A coup in Libya in September 1969, overthrowing the monarchy and establishing Qaddafi as ruler, aroused apprehension about the political future of the area (and cost us our basing privileges there). Lebanon was disintegrating; we held emergency meetings to review contingency plans should open civil war break out. Among our friends, moderate leaders in the Middle East—King Hussein, King Hassan of Morocco, Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Shah of Iran, and the Lebanese—told us either directly or through envoys of their despair at the growing radicalization of the region.

 

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The Rogers Plan

 

ut like a gambler on a losing streak, the advocates of an active American role wanted only to increase the stake. Ignoring the clearly stated positions of the two sides, they insisted that a compromise was still possible along our chosen route; they continued to believe that Israeli flexibility on borders could be purchased by improving the content of the provisions on peace. In late November, therefore, the State Department formally recommended to the President that the Four-Power talks be resumed. It was proposed that we submit a Jordanian companion paper to our Egyptian plan embodying substantially the same principles. We could do no less for a friend than an adversary, it was said, and in any event President Johnson had in effect promised Jordan the 1967 borders with minor rectifications as a bait for Jordanian acceptance of Resolution 242. It was argued that this would give us a balanced position in the eyes of the world and might provide a starting point for later negotiations even if they failed now. What the “world” was to whose eyes we were appealing was not spelled out, nor the long-term benefit to be derived from a proposal almost certain to get nowhere. No one explained why this paper should achieve a happier fate than the Egyptian document or what was the purpose of accumulating rejections.

 

In transmitting this State proposal to the President I repeated yet again my by now tiresome refrain that all of these exercises were doomed to futility. No scheme was conceivable that could bridge the gap between the two sides: “It cannot produce a solution without massive pressure on Israel. It is more than likely going to wind up antagonizing both sides. It may produce a war.” I feared that Israel in frustration might strike preemptively, or that the Arab countries would shift to hostility when we failed to impose our proposals. Every American initiative that failed played into the hands of the Soviets and strengthened the radicals.

 

Nixon scheduled an NSC meeting for December 10 to consider our course. In the meantime no further proposals were to be put forward. Secretary Rogers, however, had scheduled a comprehensive public statement of our Middle East policy for a speech on December 9. It was an odd choice of date, since the speech would be given the day before an NSC meeting that was supposed to decide on its subject matter. Rogers assured the President that he meant to break no new ground. Rogers and Sisco successfully argued that the speech would not prejudice any Presidential decisions that would come up at the December 10 NSC meeting. (It was a power play to circumvent the NSC system that would never have worked on another issue or at a later time.)

 

So Rogers spoke on the evening of December 9, 1969, to the Galaxy Conference on Adult Education, an undoubtedly distinguished group whose compelling requirement for a high-level pronouncement on the Middle East continues to escape me. The address became famous as the “Rogers Plan.” Rogers stressed that our policy was balanced and that both sides had to make concessions. And he set forth the positions that Sisco and Yost had been presenting in the Two- and Four-Power forums. Rogers insisted that the conditions and obligations of peace had to be defined in specific terms on such issues as free navigation and sovereignty; reliable security arrangements had to be worked out by the parties with Ambassador Jarring’s help. But his formulation of the territorial issue was what captured all the attention:

 

We believe that while recognized political boundaries must be established and agreed upon by the parties, any changes in the pre-existing lines should not reflect the weight of conquest and should be confined to insubstantial alterations required for mutual security. We do not support expansionism. We believe troops must be withdrawn as the resolution provides. We support Israel’s security and the security of the Arab states as well.

 

Applying these principles to an Egyptian-Israeli agreement, Rogers went on to propose the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces to the international border between Israel and Egypt.

 

Within hours everyone was shooting at the speech. Precisely because the speech contained elements already rejected by both sides, it was bound to be attacked from all directions. The Arab press, mainly Egyptian, treated the speech as an American trick to pretend to Arabs that the United States was impartial, as well as to undermine Soviet-Egyptian relations. The Soviets first issued a fairly conciliatory statement saying the Rogers speech was long “overdue”; the real question was whether the United States would press Israel to withdraw. Later, Pravda fell into line with Egyptian reactions and denounced it as an American attempt to mask its partiality toward Israel. The day after the speech, the Israeli Cabinet rejected all outside efforts to prescribe boundaries; Prime Minister Meir said that Rogers was “moralizing” and that the major powers could not make peace on behalf of others. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations expressed “grave concern”; members of the Congress weighed in. Eban was dispatched to Washington again to confer with American officials.

 

It was in this congenial atmosphere that the National Security Council on December 10 considered the State Department’s proposal to put forward a plan on Jordan comparable to that on Egypt. What possessed the Department to persevere when all the evidence indicated certain failure must be left to students of administrative psychology. Perhaps when enough bureaucratic prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than to abandon it. I argued to Rogers—somewhat disingenuously—that in the light of his effective speech, there was no need for the United States to do more. This ploy, I should have known, would not long immobilize the steamroller. State sent a recommendation to the President that the detailed Israel-Jordan peace plan—originally claimed to be only for “guidance”—be formally presented in the Four-Power talks, to “round out” the US position.

 

By now the debate had become stylized. Those who wanted to advance specific proposals thought that this would improve our standing in the Arab world. My view was that if we were not ready to impose our proposals the mere presentation of them would gain us at most two to three weeks before we were again faced with the choice of offering more or letting the negotiation blow up. The proponents of specificity thought that the Soviet Union could be induced to be moderate. I believed that a steady stream of American concessions would increase Soviet temptations to act as the lawyer for Arab radicals. Proponents of an active policy wanted to win the radical regimes to our side by making increasingly generous offers. I argued that the radical regimes could not be won over; their moderation was more likely if we insisted on a change of course as a precondition of major American involvement.

 

At the NSC meeting itself, I challenged the fundamental premise of our diplomacy that the continuing stalemate strengthened the Soviet Union’s position. In my view the opposite was the case; the longer the stalemate continued the more obvious would it become that the Soviet Union had failed to deliver what the Arabs wanted. As time went on, its Arab clients were bound to conclude that friendship with the Soviet Union was not the key to realizing their aims. Sooner or later, if we kept our nerve, this would force a reassessment of even radical Arab policy.

 

This was my strategy, which gradually became our policy from 1969 onward (over the corpses of various State Department peace plans, gunned down by the passions of the parties in the area rather than by me). In 1972 and 1973 the strategy began to succeed.

 

The outcome of the NSC meeting of December 10 was in a sense contrary to the thrust of its discussion. Unwilling to overrule his Secretary of State but also unprepared to face the consequences of a showdown with Israel, Nixon decided to let the Jordan proposal go forward while keeping the White House as far away from it as possible. Once again, he was hoping to deflect the expected criticism toward the State Department while gaining whatever diplomatic benefit there was from the presentation of the plan. On December 17, therefore, Nixon authorized the submission of the Jordan paper to the Four-Power talks. At the same time, Nixon ordered that private assurances be given to Mrs. Meir via Len Garment that we would go no further and that we would not press our proposal.

 

While the bureaucracy has been known to drag its feet in implementing directives with which it disagrees, its alacrity in carrying out instructions that it favors and that it fears may be changed is wonderful to behold. Ambassador Yost submitted the Jordan plan on December 18 within twenty-four hours of its approval.

 

Despite Nixon’s assurances, the Israelis unleashed a public and private storm over the Rogers speech, the resumption of Four-Power talks, and the Jordan paper. Mrs. Meir called a special Cabinet meeting to consider US-Israeli relations. An Israeli official told Len Garment that Mrs. Meir was “bitterly disappointed” and “heartbroken” and thought the situation “a scandal” and “calamitous.” Foreign Minister Eban publicly charged that the United States had withheld details of the Jordan paper from Israel before submitting it, even though he had met with Rogers on December 16. State Department officials retorted that Rogers described the plan to Eban in general terms. On December 22 a delegation of American Jewish leaders met with Rogers to express their concern. The Israeli Cabinet issued a statement flatly rejecting the US proposals; Mrs. Meir was said to consider them a dangerous “appeasement” of the Arabs.

 

To quell Israeli fears, Sisco suggested that we explain that the Nixon Administration positions differed little from those of the previous Administration—underscoring the home truth of our politics that a new administration is never so eager to demonstrate continuity as when it finds itself in trouble. He further recommended an early and positive decision on Israeli requests for economic and military aid. Nixon approved. This set in motion a cycle in which every negotiating step of which Israel disapproved was coupled with a step-up of Israeli assistance programs without achieving a real meeting of minds with Israel.

 

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The Evolving Strategy

 

hough we had moved in less than nine months from discussion of general principles to the presentation of specific plans, there was no diplomatic progress. Nor did relations with Egypt improve. A principal reason may well have been that we had little direct contact with Egypt, and Nasser could only conclude that the longer he waited the better our offers would become. He had no need to choose between his Soviet connection, his radical policies, and American support so long as every few months another unreciprocated American move occurred. Our position on frontiers had moved progressively in one direction—from the “weight of conquest” to “rectifications” to “insubstantial alterations.” No corresponding shift had taken place on the radical Arab or Soviet side on the critical issue of peace. At the same time, the Soviet Union did not yet perceive that it had most to lose from a stalemate; all it did was to add its criticisms to Nasser’s. On December 23, after two months of waiting, the Soviets finally replied to our proposal of October 28 which had supported essentially the 1967 borders. They rejected it. Dobrynin complained to me that the Middle East negotiations were stalled and going nowhere. Moscow, he said, now wanted the Middle East to be one of the subjects discussed in the Channel since it was clear that such questions could only really be settled “at the highest level.” I told him that we had little to add to our existing formulations. As so often, the Soviets had saved us by overplaying their hand. The Four-Power as well as the Two-Power talks were dead. By now Nixon firmly shared my view that time was not ripe for a settlement; but he preferred to let our initiative run out of steam rather than give a clear-cut order.

 

Over the winter I tried to reflect his views in drafting the President’s first Foreign Policy Report to the Congress. In order to lower public expectations the first draft had a sentence saying that the Arab-Israeli conflict was “intractable.” The State Department let out a howl of protest, arguing that this gloomy view undercut all their efforts. Rather than do battle, I softened the sentence to read in the final version (published February 18, 1970) that the Arab-Israeli problem “has serious elements of intractability.” This mollified the Middle East experts. The literary clumsiness of this phrase reflected the uneasy bureaucratic compromise. No better example could be found of the old maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.

 

But through the diplomatic deadlock the underlying issues were becoming clear. The formal positions of the parties were but the tip of the iceberg. The Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, were clearly not prepared for a real peace expressed in normal relations with Israel or any concrete definition of security. Israel was not willing to return all the territories—probably not even in return for the definition of peace it was putting forward. The conflict between the positions of the parties then was in fact intractable.

 

Nasser counted on us to extricate him from the consequences of his recklessness in 1967. But he was unwilling to relinquish his role as champion of radical Arab nationalism, which forced him into a strident anti-American posture on almost all international issues. Nor was he ready to abandon the illusion that the best way to enlist the United States was through Soviet blackmail. This led him to conduct most negotiations through Moscow rather than deal with us directly. The Soviets, in turn, either through lack of imagination or in order to maintain their claim as defenders of radical nationalism, stuck to the rigid advocacy of maximum Arab demands. There was no reason why we should pull the chestnuts of this unlikely alliance out of the fire. And therefore all the various negotiating schemes of 1969 proved stillborn.

 

But through this turmoil the inherent strength of the American position in the Middle East also gradually emerged. Nobody could make peace without us. Only we, not the Soviet Union, could exert influence on Israel. Israel was too strong to succumb to Arab military pressure, and we could block all diplomatic activity until the Arabs showed their willingness to reciprocate Israeli concessions. If we remained steady and refused to be stampeded, the pivotal nature of our position would become more and more evident. Nixon equivocated, believing in my strategy but authorizing (and then aborting) State’s tactics. In the process, partly by default, we began to follow my preferred course. The bureaucratic stalemate achieved what I favored as a matter of policy: an inconclusive course that over time was bound to induce at least some Arab leaders to reconsider the utility of relying on Soviet arms and radical posturing to achieve their ends. Once it became clear—for whatever reason—that a settlement could not be extorted from us, Arab leaders would gradually learn that Soviet pressures on us and their own intransigence only produced stagnation. They would, I thought, have to come to us in the end.

 

So in 1969, not without debate and much hesitation, the basis was laid for the later reversal of alliances in the Middle East. But it took a long time, further crises, and an anguishing war to complete it.

 

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