cause quadrupled the price of oil once in the year after the war, and
once again over the course of the decade. This brought the Arabs
international prominence and considerable influence in the United Na-
tions. Ironically, the effect on the Soviet Union was disastrous: as a
prime beneficiary of the higher oil prices (both through its exports of
oil for hard currency and its sales of weapons to oil-rich Arab states or
to clients whose purchases of weapons were subsidized by these states),
Moscow indulged in wasteful military spending and overly generous
support for other Third World clients, such as Cuba, Vietnam, and
Ethiopia, thus aggravating the economic stagnation that Gorbachev
sought ineffectually to reverse in the late 1980s. In the process of pushing
reform, Gorbachev precipitated the collapse of the entire Soviet system.

Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were
profoundly affected. The war destroyed the budding détente that Presi-
dent Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had started with
the signing of the first strategic arms limitation agreement ( SALT I) in
Moscow in May 1972, and that they had worked to deepen with a "code
of conduct" agreed to during Brezhnev's visit to the United States in
late June 1973, the gist of which was a commitment to consult in the
event of a threat of war and to cooperate in preventing it from jeopardiz-
ing their détente relationship. But détente was just not strong enough to
bring the Yom Kippur War to a halt before it enmeshed the two
superpowers in a dangerous confrontation. When the fighting in the
Middle East stopped, a "new" Cold War ensued with rapidly escalating
spirals of weapons deployments and regional crises. Not until the mid-
1980s would another Soviet leader try to improve relations with the
United States.

The Yom Kippur War was significant because for the first time both
superpowers regarded one crisis with equal seriousness, not only in
regard to their respective client states but also to their relationship with
each other. It was the first time that the United States and the Soviet
Union were locked in a direct confrontation over a Middle East issue,
the first time that they found themselves in the midst of a crisis that had
broken out while they were trying to stabilize their global rivalry in a
setting of incipient détente. And it was the first crisis to erupt when the
Soviet Union enjoyed military equivalence, both nuclear and conven-
tional. Unlike the 1956 Suez crisis or the 1967 Six-Day War, in 1973
Moscow had a potent power projection capability that it was prepared
to use on behalf of beleaguered clients. Neither superpower was dis-
tracted by pressing problems elsewhere (the United States had disen-

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