Those were momentous events in world history.
Nixon biographer and historian Stephen Ambrose wrote about this: In an artist’s rendering, an M-60 is unloaded from an Air Force cargo plane in Operation Nickel Grass, the Nixon-approved military campaign to resupply Israeli losses. Not to mention that Prime Minister Golda Meir would for the rest of her life refer to RN as “My President” and credit him with saving her country.
Perhaps most importantly, Americans can take comfort in knowing that when Israel’s very survival was on the line, their President – already consumed with overwhelming challenges on the domestic front – took decisive action to ensure Israel’s survival. I told the bipartisan leadership meeting on October 25, “I have never said that Soviets are ‘good guys.’ What I have always said is that we should not enter into unnecessary confrontations with them”… All we can hope from détente is that it will minimize confrontation in marginal areas and provide, at least, alternative possibilities in the major ones. I evaluated the Soviet behavior during the Mideast crisis not as an example of the failure of détente but as an illustration of its limitations – limitations of which I had always been keenly aware. President Nixon wrote about this in his Memoirs: interests by actively supplying the Arabs with arms before and during the war. Even as the Soviet Union was embracing détente and promoting cooperation, it was undermining U.S. The War represented, too, not the failure of détente, RN’s acclaimed strategy to peacefully coexist with the Soviets, but a knowledge and understanding of its limitations. as an ally, becoming – until 2010 – an important stabilizing force in the region. While the Soviet Union failed to provide at best a solid victory, and at worst a negotiated settlement, for its client states, Egypt turned to the U.S. The solid defeats of both Egypt and Syria ensured the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the Middle East, all while expanding American influence in the region that continues to the present day.Įgyptian forces cross into the Suez Canal on this day, 43 years ago. I am convinced history will hold us responsible if we let this opportunity slip by… I now consider a permanent Middle East settlement to be the most important final goal to which we must devote ourselves.Īs Nixon aide and historian Frank Gannon noted, “t was precisely this kind of multi-dimensional diplomatic chess that was RN’s forte.” His decisive vision ultimately culminated in the signing of the Camp David Accords during the Carter administration in 1979, creating a set of international policies, Henry Kissinger noted at the Nixon Centennial Gala in January 2013, “whose main outlines survive to this day.” I believe that, beyond a doubt, we are now facing the best opportunity we have had in 15 years to build a lasting peace in the Middle East. In a recently declassified cable to his Secretary of State dated October 20, 1973, President Nixon wrote: to gain new allies – namely those states that, as the tide of the war turned increasingly in Israel’s favor, realized that they received nothing substantial from the Soviet Union – and restart the long-stalled Middle East peace process. 
President Nixon seized upon the timely opportunity that this crisis presented in that it allowed the U.S.Though often overshadowed by its more recognized predecessor, the Six Days War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War would produce arguably more lasting and resounding geopolitical effects and consequences: Israel (shown with the blue arrows) began to regain territory by October 10. The Yom Kippur War would instantly go down in infamy as the bloodiest military confrontation between Israel and its Arab neighbors totaling nearly 53,500 total casualties on all sides involved compared to 5,500 casualties during the 1967 Six-Day War, and 10,000 casualties during the 1956 Suez Crisis.Ī map of the military maneuvers that happened 43 years ago this week. 43 years ago, the deadliest Arab-Israeli military conflict commenced with a surprise attack, coordinated mainly by Egypt and Syria, on the Israeli occupied territories in Suez and the Golan Heights.
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