ABSTRACT
In the most direct fashion, the 1978 Camp David talks tied up the attention of US policymakers at the very moment when they needed to be realizing the importance of developments in the Iranian revolution. US hopes that other Arab countries could be drawn into the Camp David framework were consistently disappointed, in part because they had been overestimated from the beginning. Assistance given to Egypt was designed to replace Arab funds withdrawn because of Camp David and to cement the US-Egyptian relationship. The resignation of Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan in October 1979 removed one of the main architects of Camp David; Jimmy Carter’s Middle East envoy, Robert Strauss, resigned in November to run the President’s reelection campaign. The underlying problem was that Egypt and Israel had different visions of what they wanted. A series of events during 1981–1982 tended to bring Arab-Israeli conflict issues to center stage and provoked a rising degree of tension in US-Israeli relations.
