Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

In opening this chapter, Kissinger states that Anwar Sadat has tragically been forgotten, first within his own country and then in the wider world, and thus his contribution to the politics of the Middle East has gone unacknowledged. Kissinger says that this is probably because he “transcended ideologies that, for decades, had contorted the Middle East” offering in their place a bold vision for peace and national sovereignty that found little purchase among a generation of Arab nationalists and their Islamist successors (207). Egypt has long served as a meeting point between the West and the Islamic world, incorporating aspects of both into its politics and culture.

Kissinger describes how, when Sadat was born in 1918, the year World War I ended, Egypt had passed from several centuries under Ottoman rule to a de facto colony under Britain and France. Part of a large family who moved from the village to Cairo as Egypt modernized, he (along with many of his generation) came to resent Western (especially British) dominion, and during World War II he was arrested for trying to make contact with German forces in North Africa. He left prison for good in 1948, just as Egypt suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the newly declared State of Israel. Furious with the pro-British monarch, Sadat and many of his fellow officers organized a coup in 1952, installing Gamal Abdul Nasser as president. Sadat played an important role (including as Vice President), but with little public profile, helping mainly to win support from Egyptian Muslims for Nasser’s largely secular government.

Kissinger says that one of Nasser’s most important moves was to seize the Suez Canal from the British and French, prompting an invasion by both countries, along with Israel, in 1956. The United States helped stop the invasion with a threat to collapse the pound sterling, but Nasser emerged as the principal hero, even though he was “reliant for food on foreign aid from the United States and for arms on the Soviet Union” (219). His ambitions proved to be beyond his capabilities, as an attempted United Arab Republic (with Syria) collapsed after three years, and Israel inflicted a decisive defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, seizing control of the Sinai Peninsula.

Kissinger claims that Sadat took these setbacks as a lesson on “the danger of placing pan-Arab solidarity above the national interest” (222). Assuming the presidency shortly after Nasser’s death in 1970, he immediately struck a stridently anti-American and anti-Israeli tone, though with far less drama than Nasser. At the same time, he instituted a so-called “Corrective Revolution” (227), purging many of Nasser’s followers. He signed a treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union in 1971, only to expel Soviet military advisors the following year without a word of warning and began putting out quiet feelers to the Nixon administration. The year after that, he launched yet another bold move by conducting a joint invasion of Israel with Syria, although likely as a means of improving his diplomatic position, states Kissinger, rather than an attempt to destroy the Jewish state. As Israel recovered from its initial shock and regained the strategic advantage, Sadat agreed to a ceasefire and permitted the first-ever official contact between Egyptian and Israeli officials since the 1948 war. With Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir similarly willing to make tentative forays toward negotiation, Kissinger met with Sadat in Cairo, where Sadat signaled his willingness to use the United States as a mediator in talks with Israel. He had concluded that “the existence of Israel was not a threat to Egypt’s being; war with Israel was. The thread could be reduced and ultimately eliminated through a new concept of security based on the process of peace with Egypt’s adversary rather than its annihilation” (245).

Kissinger argues that Sadat’s outreach would have gone nowhere if Israel was not willing to withdraw from territory in Sinai, with Kissinger constantly relaying messages from one side to the other. Kissinger and Sadat then each sought to build support for a potential peace agreement with other Arab states, most notably Syria. Syrian president Hafez al-Assad (father of current president Bashar Al-Assad) was an even more formidable negotiator than Sadat, although he proved willing to deal with Israel on a purely transactional basis. The groundwork was laid for a broader Israeli disengagement from the Sinai, now with the genial US President Gerald Ford and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the first to be born in the new country and less inclined to view Arabs as implacable enemies. Much of Rabin’s Cabinet was not so convinced, adds Kissinger, and so for the time being the two sides settled for a mutual vow not to use force against the other.

When Ford’s brief presidency gave way to Jimmy Carter, ending Kissinger’s time in government, Carter aimed at a much more comprehensive plan involving not just withdrawals and recognition, but a Palestinian state. This seemed unlikely given the new Israeli Prime Minister, Menachim Begin, was a militant Zionist who had led a terrorist group during and immediately after World War II. Yet Sadat had one more dramatic move up his sleeve, arriving in Jerusalem and visiting both the holy sites for all three Abrahamic faiths, including the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Kissinger regards this visit as “the rare occasion in which the mere fact of an event constitutes an interruption of history and thereby transforms the range of the possible” (262).

Even with this major breakthrough, the path to peace remained treacherous, Kissinger claims, with Sadat drawing ire in particular from other Arab leaders. Prime Minister Begin came to argue that peace with Egypt must exist separately from territorial claims, particularly in historic Palestine. Carter ultimately invited the two to Camp David in September 1978, ultimately crafting a peace treaty between the two nations that continues to stand into the 2020s.

Some Israelis objected to provisions that left open the possibility of shared Arab control over Jerusalem, but Arab governments erupted with fury at Sadat, prompting violent opposition from many of the same Islamist groups that Sadat had tried to court as Nasser’s Vice President. He attempted to crack down on these underground groups, but was assassinated in 1981 when a group of soldiers opened fire on him in the middle of a military parade. Kissinger remarks that Sadat’s death interrupted what could have been “a historic modification in Egypt’s pattern of being and a new order in the Middle East as a contribution to the peace of the world” (271). While Sadat convinced many that peace with Israel was a practical necessity, his broader moral vision went unrealized, says Kissinger. The Camp David Accords did, however, prove to be the first of many treaties and other arrangements over the years that normalized relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, even as peace in the region remained largely elusive.