In July 1972 Anwar Sadat abruptly ordered the withdrawal of the 25,000 Soviet military specialists and advisers in Egypt. By so doing, he later wrote, ”I wanted to tell the whole world that we are always our own masters.”The changes in the relationship with Washington and Moscow were made after Mr. Sadat had concluded that the Arabs could not achieve a satisfactory end to their confrontation with Israel as long as they were allied closely with the Soviet Union while Israel had the all-out support of the United States.
Many believe this was a calculated maneuver by Mr. Sadat, culminating in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
