The Making of Us Arms Transfer Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Antagonists, 1967-1988

In the two decades following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the United States exported a vast compass of conventional weapons to the states directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This thesis establishes the reasons for these decisions and identifies the agencies and individuals within the United States government by whom arms policy was constructed and sustained. The forces that shaped the United States' policy may be viewed as falling along a continuum. One side of this continuum...
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In the two decades following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the United States exported a vast compass of conventional weapons to the states directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This thesis establishes the reasons for these decisions and identifies the agencies and individuals within the United States government by whom arms policy was constructed and sustained. The forces that shaped the United States' policy may be viewed as falling along a continuum. One side of this continuum represents pressure from competing domestic groups, the other the strategic consideration of maintaining power globally, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union. The evidence presented here suggests that arms transfer policy emerged from considerations on the latter side of this continuum, for it was designed in agencies of the executive branch, such as the Defense Department, whose employees were chiefly preoccupied with the threat posed to American interests by Soviet activities. The programmes instigated by the executive branch, for reasons structurally endemic to the arms transfer process, were unusually shielded from domestic pressure and resistant to revision in Congress. The thesis finds that as the motivation for arms policy, domestic politics, particularly the activities of ethnic interest groups, have been overstated in the secondary literature. While contributing in some part to the refinement of policy, these pressures failed to determine its essential shape. Instead, anticommunism-a governmental conception of the American national interest defined not as the aggregate demands of the United States' constituent interest groups, but in strategic opposition to a geographic and ideological rival-provided the fundamental impetus to the United States' behaviour.