Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967–1976, Cornell University Press, Spring 2016.

Spheres of Intervention examines the history of US relations with Lebanon during a transformational period in the history of both that country and of US policy towards the Middle East. Following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the internal political situation in Lebanon became increasingly unstable, due to the regional military and political stalemate, the radicalization of the country’s domestic politics, and the appearance of Palestinian militias on Lebanese territory. After a series of internal crises in 1969, 1970 and 1973, civil war broke out in 1975. The conflict reached a temporary halt after a Syrian military intervention the following year, but this was only an end to the first stage of what would be a sixteen-year civil war.

This book traces the US role in influencing events in Lebanon during this period. During the crises between 1969 and 1973, the US sought to help the Lebanese government in a variety of ways, including providing military aid to the Lebanese military, convincing Arab countries to take measures to help the Lebanese government, mediating Lebanon’s relations with Israel, and even supporting certain militias. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the relations between the two governments declined somewhat, but the US continued to play a role in Lebanese internal politics. US officials were more deeply involved in Lebanese affairs than most outside the region realized.

Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of declassified materials from US archives and a variety of Arabic and other non-English sources, this work is a historical narrative that will interest academic and general readers alike. It provides a new interpretation of Lebanon’s slide into civil war, as well as insight into the thinking behind US diplomatic initiatives in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Reviews

“Scholars of U.S. foreign policy, the international history of the Middle East, and the Cold War will all find must of value in this book, which casts a thoughtful light on the causes and implications of the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon.”—Nigel Ashton, American Historical Review “[A]s civil conflicts and proxy wars have moved from Lebanon to Syria, Lebanon still bears the consequences of the fallout, now hosting over 1.1 million Syrian refugees (one quarter of the total number), and struggling with the problems that a huge influx of refugees into a small country brings. The history that Stocker presents in Spheres of Intervention — as well as the intriguing questions he poses — are still pertinent, and could be used to inform current US policy.” Kail C. Ellis, The Middle East Journal “As we survey the current turmoil in the Middle East, we are all the more in need of careful, dispassionate, and insightful historical scholarship on US interactions with that region, and particularly with the small but pivotal nation of Lebanon. James R. Stocker gives us that, and more. Spheres of Intervention is a richly researched, perceptive, and skillfully crafted book about a diplomatic relationship that has powerfully shaped Middle Eastern politics down to our own day. Resourcefully mining recently declassified US government documents, and incorporating Arabic- and French-language sources seldom found in Anglophone accounts, Stocker provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment we have of official US involvement in the Lebanese civil war of 1975–1976.”—Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East “Spheres of Intervention is a necessary and very valuable contribution to our knowledge about Lebanon’s recent history, Lebanese-American relations, and US Mideast foreign policy. This book is a must-read for those with a special interest in Lebanon and for historians of US policy in the Middle East. In the first book to take extensive advantage of the declassified US diplomatic cables of the period, James R. Stocker fills an important gap in our understanding of Lebanon’s foreign relations during the decade and a half leading to its collapse in 1975.”—Paul Salem, Vice President for Policy, Middle East Institute, author of Bitter Legacy: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World “Before the collapse of the state in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen there was Lebanon’s descent into prolonged and costly civil war. James R. Stocker has meticulously examined the record of US involvement in Lebanon’s drift toward war in the years 1967–1976. He rightly concludes that Lebanon per se was rarely central in the thinking of American policymakers, especially Henry Kissinger. But what the United States did or did not do in the surrounding region had important spillover effects in Lebanon. The unwillingness of the United States to tackle the Palestinian issue, which was of key importance to the Lebanese, meant that it was very hard to stabilize Lebanon once the civil war began in earnest in 1975. This is a sobering account of the destruction of a country on the margins of American grand strategy. Today’s crises in the Middle East have far too many resemblances to the story told so authoritatively in these pages.”—William B. Quandt, author of Peace Process If you buy the book by clicking on this link (or the image to the right), I get a small commission as a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program.