U.S. Decision Making in the Jordan Crisis: Correcting the Record
The Jordan Crisis of September 1970 is one of the most frequently mentioned, but least studied, episodes in the recent history of United States Middle East policy. The crisis has become a minor "condensation symbol," not unlike better known incidents such as "Munich" and "Prague Spring."' While "Munich" stands for the tragedy of appeasement and "Prague Spring" for the fleeting exception of political reform in Eastern Europe that proves the rule of Soviet repression, the "Jordan Crisis" has come to represent the supposedly positive value of close U.S.-Israeli political and military coordination in the face of Soviet-Arab ties and Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. Most important international crises are ultimately raised from their historical contexts and simplified into lessons or illustrations of one kind or another. But the Jordan Crisis is unusual because it was seen as quintessentially lessonbearing from the very beginning indeed, even before it was over. This was a consequence of three factors: first, the Jordan Crisis was the climactic, largely unexpected, denouement of the Nixon administration's first major foreign policy