Was The 1973 War Part Of The Conflict Between The United States And The Soviet Union Case Study

Question: Was the 1973 war part of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union?

Background: The United States and Soviet Union pursued a policy of “détente” or thawing of tensions from the late 1960s until 1980. This policy was intended to reduce the risk of a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. One of the central aspects of détente was communication between the two governments. Détente was pursued during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations in the United States and rule of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. This effort to improve communication led to small changes such as the installation of a direct hotline between Washington and Moscow and large changes such as the negotiations
A war that would pit the two superpowers against each other was undesirable because it would reverse the progress of détente and there would not be controls to prevent further escalation of the conflict. Furthermore, the two countries had significant reasons to not start a conflict in the Middle East. The United States was still mired in the domestically unpopular Vietnam War while Brezhnev was pushing for reductions in defense spending. Sadat recognized that unless the situation changed in the Middle East a peace agreement would not be a priority for either the United States or Soviet Union. The situation was unacceptable to Egypt however, because Israeli troops were still occupying the Sinai Peninsula. A war would give Sadat an opportunity to change the balance of power in the region and give him more negotiating leverage in future negotiations for a peace agreement. He subscribed to the theory that his predecessor, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had once told him which was that “‘if we get even 10 cm of the Sinai, and [are able] to entrench there in a way that no power could remove us from there … we will remove the shame that we carried from the 1967 defeat” (Tal, p.748). The need to remove the shame of of 1967 led Sadat to seek a way out from the frozen negotiations and he saw control of the Sinai Peninsula as a way to bring urgency to the issue of a peace agreement. Sadat knew that neither the United States nor Soviet Union wanted a conflict in the region because it would pose a threat to détente. After the start of the war, the two options would be for diplomatic negotiations to begin after Egypt had already gained a more favorable negotiating position or further escalation of a war where Israel and the United States would be fighting against the entire Arab world and the USSR. Even in the case