Craig Daigle

Craig Daigle is a specialist on U.S.-Middle East relations during the Cold War. His research focuses on American policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. Before coming to City College, he worked for the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian (2001-2007), was Assistant Editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: The Human Rights Years, Vols. I and II, and served on the Executive Council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

His book The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969-1973 (Yale University Press, 2012) is the first book-length analysis of the origins of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War.The book draws on documents only recently made available to show the war resulted not only from tension and competing interests between Arabs and Israelis, but also from policies adopted in both Washington and Moscow.  By prioritizing Cold War detente rather than genuine stability in the Middle East, Daigle shows, the U.S. and the Soviet Union fueled regional instability that ultimately undermined the prospects for a lasting peace agreement.

Professor Daigle is currently working on an international history of the Persian Gulf War and a biography of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Education

B.A. University of Maryland
M.A. James Madison University
Ph.D. George Washington University

Courses Regularly Taught

Arab-Israeli Conflict

American Foreign Relatoins, 1898-present

Cold War History 
Cold War International History (graduate) 
U.S.-Middle East Relations, 1945 to present
United States During World War II
The Era of Detente (graduate) The Vietnam War  

Research Interests

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Modern Middle East, Isralei History, Cold War International History, American Foreign Relations, World War II

Publications

Books-Published

• The Limits of Détente: The United States, the Soviet Union,and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1969-1973 (Yale University Press, 2012)
• Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Vol. XXV, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2011), editor

 Books-Under Contract

• The Cold War: A New History, under contract, Yale University Press 
• The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, under contract, Routledge

 Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• "The Russians Are Going: Sadat, Nixon, and the Soviet Presence in Egypt, 1971," Middle East Review of International Affairs," Vol. 8, No. 1 (March 2004), 1-15. link 
• "Peacemaking as Inter-state Diplomacy: Samuel Lewis," with Tamara Wittes, in Mona Fixdal, ed. Ways Out of War: Peacemakers in the Middle East and Balkans (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) link
• "A Crescent of Crisis: The Middle East, 1978-1983," in Lorenz Luthi, ed. Nexus Years of the Cold War (forthcoming)