Dynamics of third party intervention kissinger in the middle East

Ideas have a way of occurring when one least expects them to, with consequences that could not have been foreseen. So it is with the idea that spawned the project culminating in this book. Back in fall 1977, my colleague Dan Druckman encouraged me to propose a symposium on third party intervention for the 1978 annual meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA). From the outset, the plan was to assemble a small group of experts on the resolution of disputes, each laboring in the vineyard of a different social science discipline, in order to invite explora tion of similar and differences in assumptions, techniques, and approaches to intervention in conflict. In order to provide the experts with a lens through which points of similarity and departure in outlook could be viewed more clearly, it was decided to select a single illustration. of third party intervention in international affairs for common appraisal.

With the kind assistance of Dan Druckman and Herb Kelman, a set of possible case studies was developed. These included the United States' intervention in the aftermath of the Turkish-Greek conflict in Cyprus in the 1970s, the 1954 American-British intervention in the partition of Trieste, the ongoing effort to mediate the conflict between the Dutch- and French-speaking peoples of Belgium, intervention in the conflict in Northern Ireland, the intervention by Japan, Cambodia, and the United States in the 1963-66 confrontation between Indonesia and Malaysia, and the efforts at mediation by Dr. Henry Kissinger in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (the so-called October or Yom Kippur War). After some deliberation, the last of these cases was chosen for the symposium, not only because it constituted a particularly dramatic instance of intervention in a part of the world that was likely to be of concern for years to come, but also because an unusually interesting, gossipy, infor mative, and concise paper was available to describe the case: Ed Sheehan's (1976) article in Foreign Policy, "How Kissinger Did It: Step by Step in the Middle East."