Notwithstanding the difficulties the United States faced in Vietnam, Washington embarked on a strategic counteroffensive. "Neither Europe nor we can afford these days to be provincial in our thinking," wrote John McCloy to Walt Rostow, President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, on August 11,1967.352 Provincial they were not, because in these months they set forth a policy to roll back Soviet influence in the Mediterranean and to transform the sea into an "American Lake." Faced with European unwillingness to adopt military measures, the State Department recommended "modest, non-provocative political-military responses." It also decided to resume military aid to Greece despite the internal political situation of the country.353
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, in August 1968, and the election of Richard M. Nixon as US president in November created additional opportunities for the American counteroffensive. The invasion of Czechoslovakia shocked European public opinion. Although NATO governments had embraced a common policy of detente at their ministerial meeting in 1968, Nixon primarily viewed detente as a strategy "for enabling America to regain the diplomatic initiative while the war in Vietnam was still in progress. "354 Moreover, the American president was prepared to move ahead unilaterally.355 For him, the Atlantic alliance was more a formal structure than a real cooperative body in the search for solutions to the problems of the Mediterranean region. When he embarked on his offensive in the Mediterranean, three concerns shaped his policy: the need to have access to reasonably priced oil, the threat of Communism in the moderate Arab countries, and the state of relations with Israel.
Meanwhile, the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia became convinced that they could not defeat Israel militarily and were inclined toward compromise.356 Yet this compromise could only occur in a wholly different psychological environment than the one that prevailed after the 1967 war. A deal with Israel could be reached only if the Arabs could negotiate from a more advantageous position. Sadat was convinced that oil could be a powerful tool for gaining Western support; he also believed that dependency on Soviet economic and military aid constrained his options. In the early 1970s, he reduced his military ties with the Soviet Union while discussing with the Saudis the use of the oil weapon to force the West into a more flexible attitude.
When the Yom Kippur War erupted in October 1973, Egyptian successes in the first phase of the conflict caused Washington to fret over the extent of Soviet support, precipitating a partial mobilization of US forces in order to send a message to the Kremlin. Yet the Egyptian president’s aim was not actually to win the war, which he knew to be unrealistic given the danger of sparking a wider international conflict. Rather, his objective was to achieve enough on the battlefield to erase the Egyptian (and Arab) inferiority complex vis-a-vis Israel, thus setting up a new psychological balance in the negotiations that were likely to follow.357 The Soviets, in fact, were prepared to resupply his army immediately, but Sadat did not want it. Although Israeli forces managed to reverse their fortunes and gain the upper hand militarily in the war’s second phase, the situation was transformed. The Egyptians shattered the aura of Israeli invincibility, thereby making it possible to put the diplomatic option on the table.
The Paris conference of December 1973 was the first occasion when Americans, Soviets, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Israeli representatives met to settle the problems of the region peacefully. At that time, Europe faced severe oil shortages, with price hikes instituted by the Organization ofthe Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) threatening economic growth. EEC members were unable to agree on a common approach to the oil-producing countries, and Franco-American tensions were exacerbated by the harsh clash between Henry Kissinger and the French foreign minister, Michel Jobert. In this situation - with their role in Middle East affairs seemingly acknowledged - Soviet leaders believed they were on the verge of a substantial international victory. In reality, however, the fragility of their diplomatic position was revealed: the absence of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv meant that only the Americans could deal with the Egyptians and the Israelis at the same time. Kissinger’s diplomacy, which brokered the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, demonstrated the restoration of American primacy - and Soviet haplessness - in Mediterranean affairs.
OnJanuary i8,1974, Egyptians and Israelis signed a ceasefire agreement that provided for the withdrawal of the Israelis to 30 kilometres east of the Suez Canal. Kissinger’s strategy was well defined, as he explained to a panel of US experts before the negotiations began:
We can reduce Soviet influence in the area and can get the oil embargo raised if we can deliver a moderate program and we are going to do it. If not, the Arabs will be driven back to the Soviets, the oil will be lost, we will have the whole world against us. We must prove to the Arabs that they are better off dealing with us on a moderate program than dealing with the Russians.358
His strategy succeeded: in 1974, Sadat reestablished official relations with the United States, and two years later he renounced the treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. It was a stunning changing of sides by Moscow’s most important ally in the region.
Sadat’s realignment coincided with a wider deterioration of the Soviet position in the Mediterranean. Cairo’s dumping of the Kremlin did much to discredit the Soviets in the eyes of other Arab states. The USSR continued to supply Syria, Algeria, and Libya with substantial quantities of military materiel, but the illusion was shattered that, in times of crisis, Moscow could match the Americans diplomatically and stategically. Henceforth, Moscow would pay more for less credibility in the Arab capitals.
On the northern shore of the Mediterranean, the Western long-term strategic position proved to be more successful than that of the Soviets. Political developments in Europe’s dictatorships - Greece, Spain, and Portugal - validated the liberal project of the Atlantic alliance and the attraction of European integration, while the implementation of the Brezhnev Doctrine and the invasion of
16. The 1974 coup in Cyprus and the Turkish intervention that followed split the island in two. Here a Greek-Cypriot woman is looking for a relative lost in the fighting.
Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the Soviet allure in Europe. Greece’s right-wing government had been an element of weakness in the Western system and became even more of a burden after Colonel Dimitrios Ioannides took power in another coup in 1973. The strongly nationalist Ioannides helped organize a coup against the government of Cyprus in 1974, aiming at the unification of that island with Greece.
But the Cyprus coup backfired after Turkey sent in its military in July 1974 to force a division of the island between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Despairing of the incompetence of the Greek junta and fearful of the return of the Cypriot government under Archbishop Makarios III, whom they considered lukewarm toward the West, the US government acquiesced in the Turkish occupation of the northern part of the area in spite of the massive displacement of Cypriots from both parts of the island that followed. The Greek junta was ousted from power soon after the Cyprus debacle. The old liberal leader, Constantine Karamanlis, then formed a new government which slowly restored democracy to Greece, reestablishing confidence with the Western allies and joining the EEC in i98i.3°
The runaway inflation and the economic downturn caused by the 1973 oil crisis proved the end of the Portuguese dictatorship. On the morning of April 359
17. Mario Soares, the leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party, campaigning in Lisbon in 1975. Soares's party was supported by most of the West European Left.
25, 1974, a group of officers calling themselves the Movement of the Armed Forces (Movimento das Formas Armadas - MFA) took power in Lisbon in a bloodless coup. The Carnation Revolution, which they initiated, aimed at a full-scale withdrawal from Africa and a gradual move toward full democracy guided by the MFA. In reality, the officers soon lost control of the situation in the colonies, with a civil war breaking out in the most important of them, Angola.360 The collapse of the empire also meant a large influx of refugees into an already impoverished home country.
By late 1974, it seemed as if Portugal was heading toward political chaos, with the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) as the best-organized political force. In early 1975, right-wing officers launched a failed coup, which seemed to put the MFA radicals and the the hardline Communists in the political driver's seat. But through hard campaigning and substantial help from a motley group of international helpers - including the US government and various West European socialists and social-democrats - the Socialist Party under Mario Soares became the biggest party after the April 1975 elections. In November 1975, moderate army officers disbanded the MFA organization.
The leader of the centre-right within the military, Colonel Antonio Ramalho Eanes, was elected president in June 1976. Eanes invited Soares to become premier in the first democratically elected Portuguese government for more than fifty years.
This progression of events had a significant impact upon the Cold War in the Mediterranean. From a strategic point of view, Portuguese air bases and ports were vital for NATO’s forces on the continent. Even more important was control of Madeira because it protected the North Atlantic routes to Gibraltar, while the Azores provided refuelling facilities for rapid deployment of US troops to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. As a result, when the MFA had begun cooperating with the Moscow-oriented Portuguese Communists, there had been deep-seated alarm in NATO circles. Soares’s government did much to calm these fears. He kept Portugal within NATO, while moving quickly toward membership in the EEC, which the country achieved in 1986.
In Spain, when Franco died on November 20,1975, the country had already entered a period of economic growth, and this eased the political transition and strengthened the Western position in the Mediterranean. At first, it was very unclear which direction the young king, Juan Carlos, would move in. He appointed an old Franco supporter, Carlos Arias Navarro, as his prime minister, and himself swore allegiance to Franco’s principles and the political movement the general had founded, the Movimiento Nacional (National Movement). The political opposition - including the well-organized and Euro-Communist oriented Spanish Communist Party - prepared for a long struggle ahead.
Soon, however, it became clear that Juan Carlos was ready to move beyond the confines of his mentor’s policies. In the summer of 1976, during a visit to Washington, the king made clear his commitment to rapid democratization and appealed for American support. On his return home, he replaced Navarro with the younger Adolfo Suarez as prime minister. Together, the king and Suarez began to dismantle Franco’s system methodically and move toward free elections, releasing political prisoners and legalizing the political opposition as they went along. The enormous outpouring of popular support for the young king made the transformation possible; it was Juan Carlos who became the guarantor of a democratic Spain in alliance with the United States and Western Europe.
Following the invasion ofCzechoslovakia, the Italian Communist Party had been beset with internal debates. A long period of disillusionment ended only when Enrico Berlinguer became general secretary in 1972 and began to construct the Euro-Communist initiative,361 In 1973, for the first time, Berlinguer spoke in favor of the Atlantic alliance. Although terrorists from both the left wing and right wing had the country under siege and the liberal center seemed to be collapsing, something new was happening in Italian politics. In 1978, the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, the head of the Christian Democrats, marked the moment of greatest peril. But the government succeeded in crushing terrorism without impairing democracy, and a new consensus emerged regarding Italy’s appropriate place in the Western bloc.362
France also became more amenable to Washington’s wishes than it had been during the presidency of de Gaulle. After the general resigned in 1969 and died the following year, his successor, Georges Pompidou, did not share the anti-American spirit of his predecessor. Although a fervent Gaullist, Pompidou realized that his predecessor’s ambitious foreign policy, including the pursuit of leadership in Europe and Africa, aroused substantial public opposition and had been costly. Pompidou sought to cooperate with les Anglo-Saxons in Europe. He reconsidered Britain’s application for membership in the EEC and collaborated with Washington and London in the Mediterranean.363 After Algeria nationalized its oil and gas reserves in 1971, France was as vulnerable to OPEC’s diplomacy and as dependent as the rest of Western Europe on America’s arbitration of Middle Eastern affairs.
World History
