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Did you miss the part where I described how US aid went up an order of magnitude as they signed treaties with Israel?
Why would the US not care about Egypt in 1974, like them 10x more in 1975 and then even more in 1979? If you were right about the shipping, you'd expect aid to be consistent through that whole Cold War period. Or at least it would rise when they open the Suez canal, which it did in 1975. Your theory explains only the 1975 surge but not 1979. And then there's Jordan too, a country not known for its shipping lanes.
If it's just Egypt and just 1975, maybe they're buying the shipping lanes. But Egypt and Jordan, just after they sign treaties with Israel? The common denominator is Israel.
Don't say I don't understand Middle Eastern history when you haven't even understood my post.
Did you not understand my post? What do you think the "Pay off" I was referring to was?
The Egyptian-Israeli talks at Camp David happen in the context of a long simmering border conflict between Egypt and Israel punctuated by three shooting wars in as many decades. Despite the pro-West Egyptian monarchy being overthrown in '52, the US had formally recognized the new government and supported them against against the French and British. The US thinking at the time being that a stable and "neutral" and Islamist government in Egypt would be vastly preferable to a Communist one aligned with the Soviet Union. The countries that are now Syria and Iraq had already started cozying up to the Soviets and there were concerns that the whole region might "go red". This put the US in the awkward position of supporting both Egypt and Israel even while Egypt and Israel were at war with each other. As such, any support for one naturally viewed as a betrayal by the other. I can't help but notice that as much as Reddit-Nazis and the BDS crowd both like to talk about the USS Liberty and similar incidents they never talk about why tensions between the US and Israel were so strained through the 60s and 70s. Anyway, in an effort to resolve this awkwardness the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish Gaza and the Sinai to Egypt while simultaneously offering the Egyptians a security pact and generous financial incentives to walk away from the conflict. The rest as they say is history. Israel relinquished the Sinai and Egypt got paid.
My point is that it's not just Egypt and it's not just '79, nor is it just Israel, it's a whole tangled mess going back to first world war.
If the US wanted to gain favor with the Arabs, they could simply not support Israel, their number one enemy.
Syria and Egypt started cozying up to the Soviets precisely because the US was extremely reluctant to provide them weapons that might be used against Israel. The region was going red because of US support for Israel.
Tensions between the US and Israel were hardly strained through the 60s and 70s. They were improving, despite Israel's best efforts. Israel nuclearized, making the NPT into an even bigger joke and successfully got massive US miiltary aid in the '67 and '73 wars, bringing down the Arab oil embargo that cost the US hundreds of billions.
The US might have wanted Egypt onside but clearly not at the cost of dumping Israel, otherwise they would have. There's nothing messy about it, the situation is quite clear. The US clearly weighs Israeli security very highly, they were and are willing to sacrifice relations with the Arabs, oil security (quite literally when it comes to the deal where Israel gets a guaranteed US-supplied oil reserve), nuclear-nonproliferation and considerable amounts of money for this goal.
If the US was so concerned with Egyptian security, why not provide them military aid? Why not fly in billions worth of armaments if they look like they're losing a war? Because the US did not want them to defeat Israel, Israel was valued higher.
And there's US aid for Jordan too, as I keep mentioning.
??? You are surely aware that Syria got its independence from France in 1946, that the shortlived United Arab Republic was between Syria and Egypt, not Syria and Iraq?
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