EPILOGUE
SO WHAT WENT WRONG, AND WHEN?If at least the opening surprise of the Yom Kippur War went according to a joint Soviet–
Eg yptian plan, why did it all end so badly for the mutual relationship? The cliché that
Eg ypt needed the Soviets for the war, but the Americans for the peace seems closer to
reality than some other widely held notions about the interwar years that have been
reassessed in the present book. We found the Soviets to have been aware of this impend-
ing liability, but their attempts to offset it with overtures toward Israel were even more
inept than the much-overrated American outreach toward Eg ypt.
A detailed study of the interrelated military and diplomatic moves will be needed to
judge whether it was the relatively reserved US support for Israel compared with the
USSR’s for Eg ypt, more than any American blandishments toward Cairo, that gained
Washington the peace broker’s function. Whereas in the War of Attrition it was the
direct Soviet intervention that ensured Eg ypt of gaining its war goals, in 1973 the
United States enjoyed the extra advantage of never having to “put boots on the ground”
and thus did not intensify Arab enmity and distrust. Or was it Israel’s costly, hard-
fought and narrow edge in the field that gained its unenthusiastic patron this benefit?
Further study may perhaps enable a judgment whether Eg ypt—that is, Sadat—pre-
meditated his conversion to “no more war” from the time he came to power, as he
claimed in hindsight when this became advantageous; or (as seems likelier from our
examination of the interwar period) he changed course only in response to unfore-
seen developments in the latter phases of the 1973 war and afterward. If, after all, the
former possibility is borne out, it would mean the Soviets knowingly maintained
their support in an ultimately doomed effort to keep Sadat in the fold. Otherwise,
they simply squandered the return on the persistent, conscientious and dedicated
effort by 50,000 of their men, besides the enormous material cost.
There is little confirmation—in the post-Soviet and other sources that we have
reviewed—for the variety of theories that put a major breakdown in Soviet–Eg yptian
relations at some point during the Yom Kippur War itself or soon after. One such
supposed breaking point merits discussion here, as it stems from the Soviet involve-
ment in the years preceding the war. This is the Eg yptians’ armored thrust, on
14 October, beyond the original bridgeheads and out of the safety provided by the