Irresolute princes

In Irresolute Princes, author Fred Wehling challenges academia's conventional explanations for Soviet behavior during the Arab-Israeli conflict. While most analysts contend that the USSR followed a preplanned, calculated strategy of providing its Arab allies with a minimum of support sufficient only to avoid defeat and not to secure victory, Wehling disagrees. He shows that rather than following a predetermined script, Soviet actions in fact reflected the Soviet leaders' unwillingness or inability to reconcile their regional goals with broader global objectives. Adopting a novel approach to the study of great power behavior, Wehling builds on a number of studies in cognitive psychology and management science, in order to determine that, while decision makers sometimes find means of resolving conflict between goals or values, they often attempt to cope with such conflict by denying its existence, or by blaming others for contradictions between their own objectives. He examines crucial Soviet actions in three conflicts that defined the political structure of the Middle East in the later years of this century the Six Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition from 1969 to 1970, and the October War of 1973. In so doing, Wehling reveals that Soviet attempts to avoid the inherent contradictions between Soviet regional interests and global goals contributed to the escalation of these conflicts and, on several occasions, almost provoked a major U.S.-Soviet confrontation.