international relations
politicshttp://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/291225/international-relations/32979/The-arc-of-crisis
Dependence and disintegration in the global village, 1973–87 » The “arc of crisis”
Among the manifestations of the diffusion of political power in the world after 1957 was the rise of regional powers and conflicts with only distant or secondary connections to the rivalries of the Cold War blocs, of multilateral political and economic pressure groups, and of revolutionary, terrorist, orreligious movements operating across national boundaries (“nonstate actors”). The politics of the Middle East after 1972 comprised all three and so frustrated attempts by the industrial states to control events in the region that by 1978 Brzezinski was describing the old southern tier of states reaching beneath the U.S.S.R. from Egypt to Pakistan as the “arc of crisis.”
Dependence and disintegration in the global village, 1973–87 » The “arc of crisis” » Palestinian terrorism and diplomacy
The sweeping Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 had forced every Arab state to rethink its own foreign policy and the extent of its commitment to the cause of Arab unity. Egypt, having lost the Sinai, faced Israelis entrenched in the Bar-Lev line directly across the Suez Canal. Jordan, having lost the West Bank, faced Israeli troops directly across the Jordan River. Syria, having lost the Golan Heights, faced Israeli forces within easy striking distance of Damascus itself. The notion of united Arab armies sweeping the Jews into the sea had clearly proved to be romantic, while political unity among the Arabs suffered from the abiding division between nationalist and socialist states like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and traditional Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), organized in 1964 to represent some 2,000,000 refugees from the Palestine mandate who were scattered around the Arab world and from 1968 led by Yāsir ʿArafāt, was also divided between old families of notables, whose authority dated back to Ottoman times, and young middle-class or fedayeen factions anxious to exert pressure on Israel and the West through terrorism. The latter included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), formed three months after the 1967 war. Over the next year the PFLP hijacked 14 foreign airliners, culminating in its spectacular destruction of four planes at once in Jordan. In 1970–71 the moderate King Hussein of Jordan lost patience with the autonomous PLO formations in his territory and expelled them, provoking a sharp military exchange with Syria. The PLO moved its central offices to Lebanon, whence terrorists could cross the frontier to commit atrocities against civilians inside Israel. The PFLP and other Palestinian groups also linked up with extreme leftist and rightist (because anti-Semitic) conspiracies in Italy, Austria, and Germany to form a terrorist network that left no European or Mediterranean state free from the fear of random violence. In September 1972 terrorists from an organization calling itself Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games; all the hostages and five terrorists died in the ensuing gun battle with police.
The terrorist network benefited mightily from the financial support, training, or refuge provided by established pro-Soviet states like Cuba, East Germany, Bulgaria, Algeria, Syria, Yemen (Aden), and especially Libya. In 1969 the Libyan monarchy was overthrown in a military coup led by ColonelMuammar al-Qaddafi, a fanatical adherent of Nasser’s pan-Arabism. Following Nasser’s death in 1970 and the development of rich oil deposits in Libya, Qaddafi styled himself as the new leader and financier of the radical Arab cause. In imitation of Mao, he issued a little Green Bookdescribing his “new gospel. . . . One of its words can destroy the world.” The ideology was a mixture of Third World-ism, Socialism, and Muslim fundamentalism, and it called forth a “heroic politics.” In the eyes of the West, the rhetoric masked a crazed cruelty, and even in Arab eyes it seemed at best antiquated in the wake of the 1967 war.
Another new feature of Middle Eastern politics was the assertiveness of theOrganization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), composed of oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula as well as Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela. The members of this producers’ cartel accounted for a large percentage of the world’s oil reserves and wielded tremendous potential power over the Europeans and Japanese, who relied on imports for more than 80 percent of their energy needs. In the past, oil prices had been kept artificially low by the Western oil companies through bilateral agreements with producer states. By 1970, however, most host governments had taken over ownership of the production facilities, and they saw in a drastic rise of oil prices a means of accumulating capital for development and purchases of arms, as well as a way to pressure the Western states into respecting their grievances against Israel.
The most populous frontline (i.e., bordering Israel) Arab state, but one without oil revenues, was Egypt. Since 1955 Egypt had undergone a demographic explosion. Population was growing at a rate of 1,000,000 per year, and 35,000,000 people were crowded into the Nile valley and delta. The numbers and youth of the Egyptians (over half were under 25 in 1980) and the country’s economic weakness meant that frustrated and unemployed youth posed the constant threat of political instability. Certainly Egypt could no longer afford an endless crusade against Israel. These considerations dominated the thinking of Nasser’s successor as president,Anwar el-Sādāt. He could not, however, abandon Nasser’s legacy, especially with the Sinai under Israeli occupation, without losing his legitimacy at home. Accordingly, Sādāt laid a risky and courageous plan to extricate his country from its foreign and domestic stalemates. Husbanding the arms provided by the U.S.S.R. after 1967, he abruptly expelled 20,000 Soviet advisers in July 1972 and opened a secret channel to Washington, hinting that Egypt and the United States together could eliminate Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Only the Americans, he reasoned, might influence the Israelis to return the occupied regions. Then, on Oct. 6, 1973, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, he launched the fourth Arab–Israeli war.
The Egyptian army moved across the Suez Canal in force and engaged the Bar-Lev line. For the first time it made substantial progress and inflicted a level of casualties especially damaging for the outnumbered Israelis. Syrian forces also stormed the Golan Heights. The United States and the Soviet Union reacted with subtle attempts to fine-tune the outcome by alternately withholding or providing arms to the belligerents and by urging or discouraging a UN cease-fire. Nixon denied Israel an airlift of arms until October 13, preventing Israel from launching a prompt counterattack and thereby signaling Sādāt of American sympathy. Once assured of U.S. aid, however, the Israelis struck on both fronts, regained the Golan Heights, and crossed the Suez Canal. Kissinger, alarmed that the Israeli victory might be so complete as to hinder a lasting settlement, quickly agreed to call, with the Soviet Union, for a UN cease-fire. The cease-fire broke down at once, and Israeli forces encircled a 20,000-man Egyptian army corps. Brezhnev curtly warned Nixon of possible Soviet military intervention, which the United States moved to deter, perhaps recklessly, with a worldwide alert of its military forces. Finally, Kissinger threatened a cutoff of arms deliveries unless Israel halted its offensive, and peace was restored.
The 1973 war saved Egyptian honour and solidified Sādāt’s prestige to the point where he could afford to be conciliatory. The United States emerged as the “honest broker” between Egypt and Israel. As Kissinger put it, “The Arabs can get guns from the Russians, but they can get their territory back only from us.” Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” between Tel Aviv and Cairo secured an Israeli withdrawal beyond the Suez in January 1974, the reopening of the canal, the insertion of a UN force between the antagonists, and, in September 1975, an Israeli retreat from the crucial Mitla and Gidi passes in the Sinai. The United States flooded both countries with economic and military aid, and Sādāt repudiated Nasser’s Socialism in favour of policies stimulating domestic private enterprise.
The limited rapprochement that emerged from the 1973 war was purchased at great economic cost, for the Arab OPEC nations, led by Saudi Arabia, seized the opportunity to enact a five-month embargo of oil exports to all nations aiding Israel. More telling still was the price revolution that preceded and followed. OPEC had already engineered a doubling of the posted price of oil to $3.07 per barrel by the eve of the war. In January 1974 it nearly quadrupled the price again, to $11.56 per barrel. The importance of this sudden rise cannot be exaggerated. The resulting shortages and exorbitant costs accelerated the growing inflation in the Western world, exposed the energy-dependency of the industrial nations, created a vast balance-of-payments deficit in many industrial states, wiped out the hard-won economic progress of many developing nations, and placed massive sums of petrodollars in the hands of a few underpopulated Middle Eastern states. The political upshot was that the United States and Europe would have to pay close attention to the desires of those Arab states in foreign policy as long as OPEC unity survived.
In November 1977, Sādāt shocked the Arab world by announcing his willingness to go to Jerusalem personally to seek peace. When his talks with the new Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, broke down, PresidentCarter invited them both to Camp David in September 1978. During 11 days of intensive discussion, Carter succeeded in bringing the rivals together. The Camp David Accords provided for complete Israeli evacuation of the Sinai, gradual progress toward self-rule for West BankPalestinians over a five-year period, and a peace treaty signed by Begin and Sādāt at the White House in March 1979. This historic settlement dismayed other Arab states and split the PLO asunder, the so-called rejectionists refusing to recognize the settlement. Qaddafi purchased huge amounts of Soviet arms and expanded Libya’s training and supply of terrorists. In December 1979, 300 Muslim fundamentalists seized the holiest of all Islāmic shrines in Mecca. Sādāt himself was assassinated by Arab extremists in 1981.
Dependence and disintegration in the global village, 1973–87 » The “arc of crisis” » The Iranian revolution
Carter’s success in Middle Eastern diplomacy was likewise undercut by the collapse of the strongest and staunchest American ally in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran. Since the monarchy had been restored by a CIA-aided coup in 1953, Reza Shah Pahlavi had used Iran’s oil revenues to finance rapid modernization of his country and the purchase of American arms. Nixon had chosen Iran to be a U.S. surrogate in the vital Persian Gulf, and as late as 1977 Carter praised the Shah for making Iran “an island of stability.” Clearly, American intelligence services failed to detect the widespread Iranian resentment of modernization (meaning, in this context, materialism, emancipation of women, and secularization), middle-class opposition to the autocracy, and the rising tide of Shīʾite fundamentalism that were undermining the Shah’s legitimacy. Fundamentalist movements and conflicts between Sunnite and Shīʾite Muslims have arisen periodically in the course of Islāmic history, but the outbreaks of the late 20th century were especially notable in light of the Western assumption that less developed countries would naturally secularize their politics and culture as they modernized their society and economy. Instead, rapidly developing Iran succumbed to a religious revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By November 1978 the beleaguered Shah saw his options reduced to democratization, military repression, or abdication. Despite the importance of Iran for U.S. interests, including the presence there of critical electronic listening posts used to monitor missile tests inside the U.S.S.R., Carter was unable to choose between personal loyalty toward an old ally and the moral argument on behalf of reform or abdication. In January 1979 the Shah left Iran; the next month, when he requested asylum in the United States, Carter refused lest he give offense to the new Iranian regime. The gesture did not help the United States, however. An interim government in Tehrān quickly gave way to a theocracy under Khomeini, who denounced the United States as a “great Satan” and approved the seizure in November 1979 of the American embassy in Tehrān and the holding of 52 hostages there. The hostage drama dragged on for nearly 15 months, and most Americans were infuriated by the unfathomable Khomeini and frustrated by Carter’s apparent ineffectiveness.
Carter reacted to the crisis by adopting Brzezinski’s formula that the Middle East and South Asia constituted an arc of crisis susceptible to Soviet adventurism. In his State of the Union address of January 1980 he enunciated the Carter Doctrine, declaring that any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf would be viewed as an attack on the vital interests of the United States, and he pledged to form a Rapid Deployment Force to defend the region. Whether the U.S. military was truly capable of sustained combat in that remote region was doubtful. When diplomacy failed to free the hostages in Tehrān, Carter resorted in April 1980 to a military rescue mission, hoping to repeat the success of a brilliant Israeli commando raid that had freed 103 airline passengers at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, but the operation was a humiliating failure. Only in January 1981, after the overwhelming defeat of his reelection bid, did Carter achieve the release of the hostages.
Dependence and disintegration in the global village, 1973–87 » The “arc of crisis” » The Soviets in Afghanistan
Brzezinski’s fears that the U.S.S.R. would take advantage of the arc of crisis seemed justified when the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It is likely, however, that the Soviets were responding to a crisis of their own rather than trying to exploit another’s. Remote and rugged Afghanistan had been an object of imperialist intrigue throughout the 19th and 20th centuries because of its vulnerable location between the Russian and British Indian empires. After 1955, with India and Pakistan independent, the Afghan government of Mohammad Daud Khan forged economic and military ties to the U.S.S.R. The monarchy was overthrown by Daud Khan in 1973 and was succeeded by a one-party state. The small Afghan Communist party, meanwhile, broke into factions, while a fundamentalist Muslim group began an armed insurrection in 1975. Daud Khan worked to lessen Afghanistan’s dependence on Soviet and U.S. aid, and he reportedly had a heated disagreement with Brezhnev himself during a visit to Moscow in April 1977. Leftists in the Afghan officer corps, perhaps fearing a blow against themselves, murdered Daud Khan in April 1978 and pledged to pursue friendly relations with the U.S.S.R. Thus Afghanistan, under the rule of Nur Mohammad Taraki, was virtually in the Soviet camp. When Taraki objected to a purge of the Afghan Cabinet, however, the leader of a rival faction,Hafizullah Amin, had him arrested and killed. These intramural Communist quarrels both embarrassed the Soviets and threatened to destabilize the Afghan regime in the face of growing Muslim resistance. In the fall of 1979 the Soviets built up their military strength across the border and hinted to American diplomats that they might feel obliged to intervene. On Dec. 25, 1979, the Soviet army began its occupation, and two days later a coup d’état led to the murder of Amin and the installation of Babrak Karmal, a creature of the KGB who had been brought into the country by Soviet paratroops.
The Soviets would probably have preferred to work through a pliant native regime rather than invade Afghanistan, but Amin’s behaviour and Moscow’s unwillingness to risk a domestic overthrow of a Communist regime forced their hand. The invasion, therefore, appeared to be an application of theBrezhnev Doctrine and was all the more pressing given that the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union were also vulnerable to the rise of Islāmic fundamentalism. The United States was tardy in responding to the 1978 coup despite Carter’s concern over the arc of crisis and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Kabul in February 1979. At the same time, the Soviet invasion aroused American suspicions of a grand strategy aimed at seizing a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean and the oil of the Persian Gulf. Over the course of the next decade, however, the puppet Afghan regime lost all authority with the people, Afghan soldiers defected in large numbers, and the Muslim and largely tribal resistance, armed with U.S. and Chinese weapons, held out in the mountains against more than 100,000 Soviet troops and terror bombing of their villages. More than 2,000,000 Afghans became refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Western observers soon began to speak of Afghanistan as the Soviets’ Vietnam.
The Shīʿite revolution in Iran, meanwhile, provoked and tempted neighbouring Iraq into starting yet another war in the arc of crisis. The secular Iraqi regime was nervous about the impact Iranian events might have on its own large Shīʿite population. The Kurdish minority, which had resorted to terrorism in pursuit of its goal of a Kurdish state to be carved out of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, also presented an intractable problem. Finally, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein hoped to use the opportunity of Iran’s apparent near-anarchy to seize the long-disputed Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab waterway at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. Bolstered by arms purchased with oil revenues, Hussein unilaterally abrogated a 1975 accord on the waterway and launched a full-scale invasion of Iran in September 1980. After initial victories the Iraqis were surprisingly thrown back and a war of attrition commenced. The Iraqis employed poison gas and were building a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium until the Israeli air force destroyed the facility in a surprise raid in June 1981. The Iranians relied on human-wave assaults by revolutionary youths assured of a place in paradise for dying in battle.
Both sides employed imported planes and missiles to attack each other’s oil facilities, tanker ships, and, occasionally, cities. Attacks then spread to neutral shipping as well, and oil production in the entire gulf region was placed in jeopardy. Neither superpower had direct interest in the war, except for a common opposition to any overthrow of the local balance of power, but the Soviets tended to benefit from a prolongation of the conflict. In 1987 theUnited States sharply increased its presence in the gulf by permittingKuwaiti oil tankers to fly the U.S. flag and by deploying a naval task force to protect them in passage through the gulf. Compared to the situation of the 1950s, when John Foster Dulles’ CENTO arrangement seemed to ensure a ring of stable, pro-Western governments in the South Asian region, that of the 1980s was almost totally unpredictable.
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