The elusive essence: Theorizing Cold War stability and the story of the United States-Soviet encounter during the October War

Although stability is one of the most important ideas of international relations theory, it remains one of the least carefully studied and least well-understood terms in the disciplinary lexicon. The leading theories of Cold War stability have emphasized bipolarity, nuclear weapons, conventional deterrence, the obsolescence of major war, and rules of the game as dominant causes, but have not been articulated systematically or substantiated convincingly. The present work seeks address these shortcomings of the existing literature by developing an alternative explanation that conceptualizes stability as the existence of consensus among international competitors about norms of tolerable strategic behavior with respect to their most salient security interests. The study views US-Soviet relations during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War through the prisms of each of these six contending theoretical explanations and employs the method of detailed process tracing to assess the relative strengths of each approach. The norms of tolerable strategic behavior approach developed herein proved itself better able render an accurate judgment about the nature of US-Soviet relations during the October War. The dissertation argues that the superpower relationship was stable at this historical juncture because leaders in Moscow and Washington succeeded in establishing mutually recognized and respected norms of tolerable strategic behavior that forbade the use of direct military force to achieve the total military defeat or political overthrow of a superpower regional client. Most generally, this strategic norm is termed the "no military routs allowed" norm. In practice, the general norm was supplemented by five derivative corollaries. These five incarnations of the "no routes allowed" formula prohibited the use of military force by Israel: (1) to conduct prolonged strategic bombing in depth against Soviet client states, (2) attack or occupy their capitals or other deep interior territory, (3) physically destroy neutralized Arab military forces in a gratuitous manner, (4) force the unconditional surrender of the Egyptian Third Army, or (5) elsewise humiliate Cairo or Damascus in a way that threatened their political and military integrity.