Egypt's humiliation in 1967 had a visibly dramatic impact on President Nasser. His associates recall that his hair ‘turned white’ and he lost the ‘spark’ in his eyes, subsumed as he was with the bitterness of defeat. In the context of frayed diplomatic relations, American policy-makers increasingly viewed Nasser as the ‘villain’ of the war and a ‘Soviet client’. As Arabist Richard Parker put it, ‘We had no particular interest left in Egypt. All the Americans had been kicked out … [It was] very hard to get anybody to pay any attention to Egypt. Very hard to get anybody to take Egypt seriously.’ Against this increasingly adversarial relationship, the British assumed the more neutral role of ‘honest broker’ in the Arab–Israeli dispute, authoring, for example, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories in exchange for peace. The protracted War of Attrition on the Suez Canal, culminating in the unprecedented Soviet intervention of 10,000 men to protect Egypt against Israeli deep penetration raids, raised important questions about Egypt's commitment to peace and independence and Soviet willingness to escalate the regional conflict.

An examination of the diplomatic and intelligence assessments of these events provides a more nuanced view of the War of Attrition than that which exists in the current literature. The historical record thus far has emphasised Western miscalculation and the West's broad misunderstanding of Nasser's intentions in launching the War of Attrition. One study, for example, asserts that ‘the Americans were still unable to assess Egypt's motives correctly or the logic behind its military actions’ during this period. Similarly, Richard Parker attributes the failure to predict Soviet intervention in 1970 to a ‘lack of imagination’.