ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Soviet and US strategies at the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel on October 6, 1973. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt decided to go to war because he had lost hope that negotiation could successfully address the issue of Israel's occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. As the threat to Egypt grew, Leonid Brezhnev invited Henry Kissinger to Moscow to negotiate a cease-fire resolution to be put before the UN Security Council. The Soviet strategy of threatening unilateral intervention if the fighting did not stop in the Middle East might well have resolved the crisis. Brezhnev was signaling a serious intent to cooperate in enforcing an end to the fighting. On October 25, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations supported a resolution in the UN Security Council to dispatch a peacekeeping force that, by convention, excluded Soviet and US forces.
