Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister, answered in ringing Churchillian cadences, coining the word "politicide" (death of a country) as the crime of which the Arabs were guilty (see THE WORLD). He was followed by a group of Arab and European spokesmen who either denounced Israel or admonished it against territorial aggrandizement. Of the rhetorical encirclement Eban is said to have quipped: "Never have so few owed so little to so many...
Politicking v. Realpolitik. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg introduced an alternative resolution to the Soviet proposals that incorporated the five principles laid down by Johnson and added the suggestion that Arab-Israeli peace talks be assisted by a disinterested mediator. After Goldberg's formal motion, the General Assembly became a kind of Hyde Park Corner for every diplomatic soapboxer in town...
...since the 1962 Cuban missile debacle, which helped hasten the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow has played for smaller stakes at great cost and scant return (see box). One investment it could not liquidate, however, was the Middle East. With the decline of Western influence and the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, the volatile, petroliferous Moslem world became an irresistible and comparatively safe target for Russia's rulers. Their main goal, in the Middle East as elsewhere, was to displace U.S. influence. The ultimate cost of Russia's aid to the Arab world was between $3 billion...
Even though it became the custodial power of the Arab world, the Soviet Union found that it could not control events. While the Soviets had every reason to welcome turbulence in the area, they could not restrain their clients from provoking an explosion that eventually threatened a direct Russian-U.S. military confrontation?which might well have occurred if the tide of battle three weeks ago had flowed differently and Israel had been faced with extinction...
Massive Reassessment. Aside from the obvious uncertainties about the Arab countries, eventual relations with Israel and the political longevity of the principal Arab leaders, the Russians have been suffering from their own where-do-we-go-from-here problems. The system of collective leadership practiced since Khrushchev's removal in 1964?what State Department Policy Planner Zbigniew Brzezinski calls a "regime of clerks"?has resulted in a slow-motion foreign policy that inhibits innovation or quick decision even more effectively than Washington's dinosauric bureaucracy. Moscow's inability to get itself out of its self-dug holes, no matter...