My Amazon Review of Martin Indyk's "Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy"

Metternich in the Middle East

Martin Indyk, two-time ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and special envoy to the middle east under President Obama, has written an homage to Henry Kissinger’s middle eastern diplomacy before and after the October 1973 war. Indyk quotes extensively from Kissinger’s “A World Restored,” a book I read fifty years ago, on the role of Count Metternich at the 1815 Congress of Vienna that established order in Europe for the next 100 years. To Kissinger the role of diplomacy is not so much as to establish peace, but rather to establish a stable order based upon the balance of power and legitimacy.

 

On becoming President Nixon’s national security advisor in 1969 and later Secretary of State, Kissinger’s goal for American foreign policy in the middle east was to get the Russians out of the region and to avoid a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He succeeded in both of those tasks, but it took the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the statesmanship of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make those goals a reality. Along the way U.S. forces had to go on a worldwide nuclear alert (Defcon 3) fearing a direct Russian military intervention in the region.

 

Indyk gives us a daily play-by-play of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the region. First, by disengaging Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Suez Canal area and later the much more difficult negotiation involving the critical passes in the central Sinai. Similarly, Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria dealing with Syrian President Hafez Assad in negotiating a partial disengagement in the Golan area. Further Kissinger was not above being duplicitous by suggesting his ideas as coming directly from the parties involved and vice versa in search of a deal. Further, because Kissinger believed in hierarchy of power both the Jordanians and the Palestinians were largely frozen out of the process.

 

Not only did Kissinger understand the players, but he also understood the geography and the topography of the region to better understand the military situation on the ground. As a result, he created a step-by-step process whose results hold to this day.

 

On the way we meet such key Israeli players as Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister Moshe Dayan and he brings out the much unheralded role of Israeli ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz. Indyk relied on recently declassified sources in the United States and Israel and the held numerous interviews with Henry Kissinger.

 

While reading this book one marvels at Kissinger’s stamina shuttling back and forth between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. While all of this was going on Kissinger had to deal with the Russians on nuclear issues, the fall of the Nixon presidency under the strain of Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. His plate was more than full.

 

Indyk learned the hard way that potential big deals in the middle east have a way of blowing up. He was directly involved with President Clinton’s proposals with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in 2000 which blew up into the second intifada and further he was involved with President Obama’s efforts in 2013 which went nowhere. His lesson is that a peaceful order in the middle east will come gradually in small steps and the lure of the big deal is pure chimera.

For the full Amazon URL see: Metternich in the Middle East (amazon.com)