Soviet Strategy in the Middle East

George W. Breslauer, George W. Breslauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317418757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études régionales

Few regions of the world are as politically turbulent as the Middle East, and nowhere is the potential for superpower conflict greater. How does the Soviet Union view the Middle east conflict? Can the USSR play a constructive role in the peace process? In this volume, first published in 1990, these questions and others central to an understanding of Soviet strategy in the region are addressed. Previous analysts of Soviet-Middle Eastern relations have tended to emphasize either the cooperative or the competitive aspects of Soviet behaviour. Breslauer instead offers the multidimensional concept of 'collaborative competition' to describe the mixed motives, ambivalence, and sometimes conflicting perspectives that have informed Soviet strategy in the region. In such an unstable environment. this strategy of collaborative competition has in turn encouraged 'approach-avoidance' behaviour; for example, while the Soviets may seek to moderate their radical allies, they remain fearful that these allies, once moderated, might defect to US patronage. Under Gorbachev, the Kremlin continues to pursue this same strategy but with increased attention to improving collaboration, redefining the nature of the competition, and easing the approach-avoidance dilemma. Breslauer argues that these changes could lead to more flexible Soviet behaviour in the region. This volume combines new, in-depth research on Soviet policy with new interpretations, including insights drawn from relevant theories of international relations.

Part I
Interpreting Soviet Strategy

Chapter 1
On Collaborative Competition

George W. Breslauer
University of California, Berkeley

The Middle East has been a region of constant crisis, local wars, and superpower confrontations for the entire period since World War II. Creation of the State of Israel in 1948 produced the first Arab-Israeli war, from 1948 to 1949. The Suez crisis in 1956 drew in the superpowers. Local instability in the region in 1958 resulted in U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Lebanon, and British troops landing in Jordan. A bloody civil war, which drew in Egypt and other Arab states, took place in Aden (Yemen) in the early 1960s. In 1967 a brief, but full-scale war between Israel and her immediate neighbors led to mutual threats of superpower intervention. There followed in 1969 and 1970 the so-called "War of Attrition" between Israel, on the one hand, and Egypt and Syria, on the other. A full-scale war broke out again in 1973 between Israel and her neighbors, and resulted again in ever-more-credible threats of superpower confrontation. In 1975 and 1976 a civil war in Lebanon resulted in massive Syrian military intervention and temporary occupation of parts of that country, a civil war and partial occupation that have continued, on and off, to this day. In 1982 that same country—Lebanon—suffered an invasion by Israel that resulted in war between Israel and Syria, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), on Lebanese territory. This war drew the Soviet Union ever more deeply into the military defense of Syria and resulted in the temporary introduction of U.S. Marines into Lebanon. In the meantime, Iran and Iraq went to war in September 1980—a war that inflicted over one million deaths during its eight-year duration and introduced the use of both chemical warfare and ballistic missiles into the recent war patterns of the area. Certainly, the Middle East qualifies as the most volatile and potentially escalatory region of the world, given the depth and intractability of the conflicts, the level of armament and war readiness of most large states in the region, and the depth of superpower commitment, involvement, and antagonism in the area. The spectre of Iran, Iraq, or Libya acquiring nuclear weapons to match those possessed by Israel adds a dimension to the problem that is not only escalatory but apocalyptic.

The Soviet Union was drawn gradually into this turbulent arena (for the history, see Dawisha 1979; Halliday 1981; Klinghoffer 1985; Ra'anan 1969; Rubinstein 1977; Ro'i 1979; Smolanksy 1974). In 1948 it was a supporter of the establishment of the State of Israel, just as it had supported the Jews with military assistance and training in their struggle against the British. For the most part, however, Soviet policy in the region during Stalin's last years was characterized by lack of engagement. Stalin trusted nothing he could not control directly and chose to focus his attention on the conventional East-West military struggle in Central Europe and the Far East.

After Stalin's death the political succession struggle in Moscow combined with vigorous Western efforts to "encircle" the USSR with hostile alliances to revive the issue of the Soviet role in the Third World, and resulted in victory for a "forward" strategy in distant regions. The Czech-Egyptian arms deal of 1955, initiated by Moscow, was a concrete expression of that strategy, and constituted a dramatic Soviet entry into the Middle East great-power competition. Although the deal was a direct response to the formation of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, Soviet behavior elsewhere in the Third World during 1954 and the debates in Moscow about alternative strategies to follow in the post-Stalin era suggest that a reversal of Stalin's arms-length relationship with the Middle East competition might well have taken place even in the absence of the Baghdad Pact.

In subsequent years, however, the most optimistic Soviet expectations about the gains to be had from such competition were tested and partially dashed. The Suez crisis of 1956 and the Western military interventions in Lebanon and Jordan in 1958 revealed the limits of Soviet ability to deter such actions, as well as the limits of Soviet willingness to sign on as a military protector and not just a military supplier of allies in the region. Coups and countercoups within the region, the fiercely independent behavior of Egyptian leader Nasser, and the willingness of erstwhile Soviet allies in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq to repress local Communist parties revealed the limits of Soviet ability to translate presence into influence, much less control.

On the other hand, that same instability and unpredictability prevented the United States and Great Britain from establishing or reestablishing control as well. A coup in Iraq in July 1958 brought down the three-year-old Baghdad Pact. A civil war in Aden during the early 1960s drew in Egyptian troops and Soviet military assistance on the antiroyalist side. All this turmoil saw Soviet involvement tempered by an urge to avoid overextension and excessively high expectations.

Soviet competitive involvement would subsequently deepen, however, in response to both "defensive" provocations and "offensive" opportunities. In 1963 and 1964, for example, decisions on naval expansion made after the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with the Soviet reaction to U.S. deployment of Polaris submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean (which posed a direct missile threat to the Soviet homeland) to cause a redefinition of Soviet Middle East policy. Moscow came to define competition in the region as increasingly military in character. A fairly high priority would subsequently be accorded to the search for strategic military assets, such as port facilities and basing rights, to neutralize the U.S. threat.

The Syrian revolution of February 1966 constituted an offensive opportunity that further deepened Soviet involvement and commitment in the region. It held out the prospect that the Soviets would acquire basing rights on the Mediterranean Sea with which to counter the presence of the U.S. Sixth Fleet. And it held out the further prospect of Syrian-Egyptian unity, on an anti-imperialist and anti-Israeli basis, under Soviet sponsorship. All of which promised to greatly increase Soviet influence in the region.

But the timing of the radical Ba'athist victory in Syria was unpropitious for advancing another Soviet goal: avoidance of an Arab-Israeli war. Rhetorical and military attacks in the region were escalating in 1966 and 1967. Moscow supported the belligerent Syrian rhetoric and sought to induce Egypt to commit to Syrian defense as a means of deterring Israeli attacks on Syria. The United States and Israel were active in efforts to isolate and destabilize the Ba'athist regime. The United States had intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and was bringing about the escalation of the Vietnam War. Leaders in Moscow were not in agreement on how to gain or protect a new ally without causing a superpower confrontation. In a nonsuccession period the decisions might have been different ones but, as in 1954 and 195ST the interaction between political competition in Moscow and international provocation apparently gave the advantage to leaders who urged a "tough" line. The result was a policy that sought to protect a radical new ally by pushing for Arab unity and Egyptian mobilization as a means of deterring U.S. or Israeli intervention, while simultaneously seeking to avoid escalation into a full-scale war.

The advocates of this relatively high-risk policy rationalized that Israel was too weak or weak-willed to preempt and that Israel could be deterred by Soviet threats. They were wrong. The June 1967 war, therefore, led to another major policy reevaluation, resulting in a strategy of (what I call) "collaborative competition" that has prevailed to this day.¹ According to that strategy, Soviet policy could afford neither to abandon the competitive struggle in the region nor to ignore the requirement of explicitly coordinating with the United States on a sustained basis and on the basis of compromise, in hopes of finding mutually agreeable terms that would reduce the escalatory potential of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The 1967 war transformed the Soviet Union from a supplier and a diplomatic patron into an ambivalent military protector of allied governments in the region.

That ambivalence stems from the mixed motives and conflicting goals Soviet leaders have pursued in the Middle East since 1967. On the one hand, they have sought to prevent their clients or allies in the region from unleashing wars, to temper the most radical demands of their clients, and to collaborate with the United States in order to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict through some sort of settlement. On the other hand, they have sought to compete for influence and allies in the region, to prevent the expansion of U.S. influence, to gain Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, to ensure that their allies do not suffer total military defeat, and to avoid situations in which they could be accused by the Arabs of having sold out to the "imperialists." These are difficult balls to juggle at once. The result has been a dualism in Soviet policy and an ambivalence in Soviet attitudes. One common expression of that ambivalence often has been Soviet willingness to browbeat allies, but never to threaten or pressure them sufficiently to force behavioral changes that would satisfy Washington's and Israel's conditions for settlement.

The years since 1967 have seen so many wars in the region that policymakers in both Washington and Moscow have come to realize the dangers (diplomatic, economic, and military) associated with allowing these conflicts to continue unabated. They have managed to avoid being drawn into a shooting war with each other, which might have triggered an uncontrolled nuclear escalation and have shown mutual restraint and caution at key points in the periodic crises, when the prospect for escalation was greatest. In addition, each side has put forward plans for settling the Arab-Israeli conflict by rooting out the basic causes of the wars.

The first major Soviet plan appeared in December 1968 and called for trading land for peace—Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and settlement of the Palestinian problem, in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist and an end to the state of war in the region, which would be guaranteed by the great powers. The United States produced, in 1969, a proposal (the Rogers Plan) that was very similar to the Soviet plan in its call for trading land for peace, though it differed in certain important details. For a variety of reasons (principally, mutual superpower ambivalence, opposition to the plan by both Egypt and Israel, divisions within the Nixon administration, and the escalation of Soviet support for, and involvement in, the Egyptian military effort in 1970), the superpowers never managed to converge in their positions, much less coordinate their policies and pressure their allies to reach a settlement.

After 1970 American policy continued to produce plans for peace, but with an eye primarily toward unilateral U.S. mediation of the settlement process, rather than with an eye toward coordination of positions with the USSR. During Henry Kissinger's term, first as national security advisor to President Nixon (1969-73), then as secretary of state for Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-77), the emphasis was on driving a wedge between the USSR and her main ally in the region—Egypt—and on excluding the Soviet Union from the peace process. This strategy yielded tangible successes for American policy: it succeeded in disengaging the warring forces after the 1973 war (Kissinger personally mediated disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt [1974 and 1975] and between Israel and Syria [1974]); it led Egypt to switch from Soviet to American patronage in the years 1974-76; and it laid the groundwork for both the Camp David agreement of 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979 (each mediated by President Carter). What is more, despite the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the lack of real progress in settling the Palestinian problem, Egypt has, to this day, remained on a peace footing vis-à-vis Israel.

In the meantime, successive U.S. administrations have put forth frameworks for reaching a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict that have inched away from previous terms. Increasingly, both President Carter and President Reagan acknowledged the centrality of the Palestinian problem to a solution of the state of unabating conflict that surrounds the Arab-Israeli relationship. Indeed, by December 1988 the Reagan administration had begun formal discussions with the PLO on the terms of a peace settlement. Neither administration, however, proved willing to abandon the commitment to unilateral mediation of the conflict. The United States continues to seek means toward peace that will not increase the status or influence of the Soviet Union, either in the process of settlement or in the outcome of that process, though the U.S. and Israeli determination to exclude the USSR may be weakening.

Predictably, Moscow has reacted with hostility and defiance to this American approach. In response to U.S. efforts to exclude the Soviet Union, Moscow has typically raised the competitive ante by deepening ties with her clients or allies in the region in ways that would obstruct American efforts at unilateral conflict management or resolution (Breslauer 1985). For example, after U.S. exclusionary diplomacy accelerated in 1974 and 1975, Moscow broadened and deepened ties with Libya, Algeria, and the PLO. After Camp David it deepened ties with the more radical People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

At the same time, Moscow has consistently touted her own terms for peace. In fact, since December 1968 the Soviet negotiating position has been remarkably consistent. With some variations resulting from changing circumstances on the ground and the dynamics of U.S.-Soviet interaction, the Soviet position has consisted of the following desiderata:

1. U.S.-Soviet comediation of the settlement process, either through collusion behind the scenes or through cochairmanship of an international conference, or through some combination of the two;
2. Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the June 1967 war;
3. Establishment of a Palestinian homeland of some sort on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (a position not yet included in the 1968 program, which only called for a just resolution of the Palestinian problem); and
4. U.S.-Soviet (and perhaps other great-power) collaboration to provide concrete guarantees of the security of all states in the region, including Israel.

How much flexibility is there in the Soviet negotiating position? The basic terms are broad, vague, and, to some extent, open ended. The Soviet position has vacillated or remained silent regarding d...