Doctrinal Cycles and the Dual-Crisis of 1979
Though presidential doctrines claim to be broad, forward-looking articulations of national security principles, they are in fact reactive and narrow. They emerge following crises and can subsequently constrain security policy, creating ideal conditions for new crises to emerge. This paper thus argues that in the pursuit of security, presidential doctrines can perpetuate a cycle of instability. Using the Nixon Doctrine as the present case study reveals that the strategy first came as a response to the failure in Vietnam, then rendered the US unable to foresee or manage the events of 1979: the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These crises subsequently forced a wholesale reassessment of security in the form of the Carter Doctrine. In examining this period of US–Middle East relations, the constricting, reactive nature of doctrines and the concomitant cycles of instability become self-evident.
The Middle East Crisis
On 6 October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched simultaneous attacks against Israel beginning the fourth and largest Arab—Israeli war. Over the next three weeks the fight for territory in the Middle East, through a series of outside interventions, posed a multiple threat to the foundations of international peace and prosperity. For the United States and Soviet Union, the conflict quickly turned into a major test of their new relationship, as they took opposite sides launching massive re-supply efforts to the Israelis and Arabs. When their joint efforts to negotiate a ceasefire broke down, the superpowers became engaged in a sharp trial of wills. In response to a Soviet threat to directly intervene, on the evening of 24 October, the United States put its forces, including nuclear facilities, throughout the world on a high state of alert. Although the measures lasted for just a few hours, for many, it marked the most perilous moment of the Cold War after the Cuban missile crisis.
The Arab-Israeli War
THE recent Six Day War in the Middle East grew out of the sterile confrontation to which the peoples of the region had committed themselves over the past twenty years. Both parties had frequently proclaimed their intention to go to war under certain circumstances. It seems unlikely, however, that any of them plotted and planned war for 1967. It seems more likely that they blundered into it. Both sides might on many occasions have moved to end their confrontation by compromise, but this neither side showed the slightest willingness to do. The Israelis, feeling themselves be leaguered by fifty million hostile neighbors, acutely conscious of the recent fate of six million Jews in Europe, believed any signifi cant concession would merely whet insatiable Arab appetites and start Israel down the slippery slope to extinction. The Arabs, looking upon the establishment of Israel as the latest in a series of imperialist occupations of their homeland, of which the presence of a million Palestine refugees was a constant reminder, found it emotionally and politically impossible to accept Israel as a perma nent fact of life or to forego harassing it and conspiring against it. This common intolerance and mutual harassment had brought on war in 1956. It is pertinent to note that, in his "Diary of the Sinai Campaign" published in 1966, General Dayan wrote that the three major objects of that campaign from the Israeli point of view were "freedom of shipping for Israeli vessels in the Gulf of Aqaba; an end to the Feydayen terrorism; and a neutraliza tion of the threat of attack on Israel by the joint Egypt-Syria Jordan military command." With slight variations, these were the issues that brought on war again eleven years later.