The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

I will be pleased, though, if this view of the Cold War as a whole produces some new ways of looking at its parts. One that has especially struck me is optimism, a quality not generally associated with the Cold War. The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict having been fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end.

I listened to this part about 3 weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and people actually were worried about a global war. I found it funny how this claim appears 5 minutes into the book.

The first opportunity fell to the Americans. The Moscow summit had come as a shock to Anwar el-Sadat, Nasser’s successor as president of Egypt. The Soviet Union had done nothing to prevent Israel from taking the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip during the 1967 Six-Day War, and now Brezhnev seemed to be ruling out future efforts to help Egypt get these territories back.24 Sadat decided, accordingly, to end his country’s long-time relationship with the U.S.S.R. and to seek a new one with the United States—which, as Israel’s ally, might be in a better position to deliver Israeli concessions. When Nixon and Kissinger ignored him, even after Sadat expelled some 15,000 Soviet military advisers from Egypt, he found a way to get their attention by launching a surprise attack across the Suez Canal in October, 1973. It was a war Sadat expected to lose, fought for a political objective he shrewdly calculated he would win. For would the Americans let Israel humiliate a leader who had already diminished Soviet influence in the Middle East? They would not. After the Israelis repelled the Egyptian attack with the help of massive American arms shipments, Kissinger rebuffed a demand by Brezhnev for a jointly enforced cease-fire, even ordering a brief nuclear alert to reinforce the rejection. He then personally negotiated an end to hostilities, earning gratitude in both Cairo and Tel Aviv while the Russians gained nothing at all. Five years later, after negotiations with the Israelis medi...

I don't remember they taught us in school that this war was just a tool for Egypt to change its status with the US. Actually, they didn't teach us about this war at all!