On 1 October 1970, President Gamal Abdel Nasser was carried to his grave after a sudden and fatal heart attack. The display of public grief and national solidarity at Nasser's funeral was unprecedented in Egypt and the event is still regarded as one of the largest public funerals in world history. It was symbolic of the ‘moderation’ with which Nasser had come to be regarded that his final act as international statesman was facilitating a reconciliation between King Hussein and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the bloody civil war that had raged in Jordan that summer. Analysts were faced with the challenging task of assessing Nasser's successor and his likely policies in a fragile Arab–Israeli climate.

Most historians have intimated that Nasser's death was welcomed by the West. William Quandt, for example, recalls that Sadat was viewed in Washington ‘as a considerable improvement over Nasser’. Similarly, erstwhile Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad writes in his memoirs that Nasser's death was met with relief by the Americans, who regarded him as a ‘stumbling block on the road to peace’.

The most recently declassified documents show either (or perhaps both) the power of retrospect in skewing historical recollection or the multiplicity of views on the new Egyptian leader. In fact the new President was overwhelmingly seen as a weak, temporary figure occluded by Nasser's shadow. Moreover, Sadat's priorities were visibly different and as a result the leader was essentially regarded (particularly by British diplomatic analysis) as a considerably inferior statesman to his predecessor. This often manifested itself in an inconsistent political orientation, most evident in his relations with the Soviet Union.

Sadat's sudden expulsion of the Soviet advisors in 1972 was an exemplary expression of the new Egyptian leadership's unpredictability.