After World War II, the prior world of multipolarity was divided into an ideological ‘cold war’ between the United States and Western Europe and the Soviet Union and the burgeoning revolutionary world shaped by Lenin and Marx. For 46 years to even today, this struggle between the East and West overtook internal European politics and united a Western front in the organizations of NATO and the European Union. It also shaped conflict worldwide with proxy conflicts between competing world views taking over all 6 inhabited (and sometimes even Antarctica) continents worldwide.
One area that still takes the headlines today, and dominates foreign policy thinking, is the Middle East & North Africa. This area, long dominated by colonial powers like the England (later United Kingdom & Great Britain), France, Italy, and Russia, had boundaries placed on a mostly nomadic native population who were made subservient to their European masters. This has led to centuries long conflict between the Major powers and their colonial conquests. Britain, by far the largest colonial power in the region, held strict power from Sudan to India in the Far East, and did not begin to let go of these lands until the ‘decolonization’ efforts of the Labour Party post-WWII. The withdrawal of the presence of foreign powers & what was viewed as the institution of subservient (and sometimes “puppet”) monarchies led to an uprising of Arab Nationalism that was more ‘secular, pan-Arabic, and socialist’ in nature.
The Arab Cold War?
For most scholars, the beginning of what is known as the Arab Cold War was the ‘Free Officers’ coup d'état (aka 23 July Revolution or Egyptian Revolution of 1952) led by Gammal Nasser & Mohammed Naguib, toppling the corrupt King Farouk and forcing him to install his infant son, Ahmed Fuad (Fuad II), who ruled for 1 year under a regency until 1953 when Egypt was declared a republic. In 1954, he arrested then President Naguib after an assassination attempt on his life by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist counter to the secular Free Officers. In 1956, Nasser was elected President of Egypt, a position he held until his death in 1970. Nasser was the leading figure in the non-aligned movement which sought to be free from both Western and Soviet influence. Rejecting what he saw as Western imperialism, he also sought to extinguish the Soviet Communism he saw as undermining the traditional Arab culture and religious values. Nasser also supported the cause of Palestinian ‘Right of Return’ which put him at odd with many of the Western powers, like Great Britain and the United States.
An important distinction is that the Arab Cold War was not a clash between capitalist and communist economic systems as it was in Europe and North America. What tied the Arab Cold War to the wider global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was that the United States backed the conservative Saudi Arabian-led monarchies, while the Soviet Union supported the Egyptian-led republics adhering to secular Arab socialism, even though these Arab republics actively suppressed communism.
In tandem with this was the Arab revolutionary nationalist republican support for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial revolutionary movements outside the Arab World, such as the Cuban Revolution, the native population in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and the struggle of the ANC in Apartheid South Africa, along with the Arab monarchical support for conservative governments in predominantly Muslim countries, such as Pakistan.
The Israel Question
On May 14, 1948, the representatives of the Jewish residents of then British Palestine gathered and David Ben Gurion proclaimed the formation of the state of Israel, which came after 2 years of intense in-fighting after the United Nations had called for a 2-state solution with an international Jerusalem on which the Jewish representatives agreed and the Palestinians and Arab Legion turned down in full. On the same day as Israel declared independence and Britain relinquished all claims to the territory, the surrounding Arab nations including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen launched an invasion into the newly established country. Due to extremely poor cooperation amongst the Arab armies, the new nation of Israel defended itself and it’s territory with about a 1% loss of life in Israel and between 4,000 and 15,000 killed amongst the Arab nations.
The loss of the Palestinian land and to the newly birthed nation of Israel added fuel to the ever-growing fire of the coming Arab Revolution in countries like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. It also solidified a common cause for the Arab nations to rally around - the retaking of Palestine. In July 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, an international gateway connecting Europe and Asia, which was primarily owned by British and French national stockholders. 3 months later, Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula which was under Egyptian control and bordered Israel & the Suez Canal. The ensuing conflict lasted for just under 7 days from October 29 to the British ceasefire on November 6. During this time, the Soviet Union threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side and attack British, French, and Israeli forces. Under Article 5 of the NATO charter, this would’ve brought the United States into a state of war with the Soviet Union and most likely precipitated World War III. However, due to both Soviet and American pressure, all sides ceased hostilities which Israel keeping a majority of the Sinai Peninsula as a speed bump to another Egyptian invasion. It is also believed that this crisis signaled the end of England as a global power and emboldened the Soviet Union to invade Hungary.
A New Enemy: Islamism
For most scholars, the Arab Cold War came to an end in the mid-to-late 1970s due to many reasons: the success of Israel in the Six Day War, the rise of Sadat in Egypt, the Lebanese Civil War and the fall of the only Christian government in the Middle East, Egypt’s subsequent peace treaty & normalization of relations with Israel in 1978, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. What emerged was a new Pan-Arab Islamic Revival which threw off the socialist secularism in favor of a radical Islamic view of the world. However, this new world pitted Islamic schools of belief against each other like the Shi’a dominated Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini and the Sunni-ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a socialist secular Baathist. It also developed a new strand of proxy with the Russians growing closer with Iran and the United States and the West developing a more generous relationship with the conservative Wahabi monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Sadat emerged as a reformer of the Nasserist regime with the normalization of relations with Israel and Israel’s return of the Sinai to Egypt. Sadat also became known as the ‘believer President’ and introduced a greater expansion of Islamic belief & law into Egyptian society. Finally, the Iranian Revolution with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini’s harsh Shi’a interpretation of Islamic law, transformed the once secular Iran under the Shah to the Islamic Republic that is still in existence today. This Islamic revival also led to the Intifada in Israel with the rise of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) sanctioned suicide bombers which attacked Israeli soft targets like buses and airports. The PLO, under Arafat, embraced a twisted version of Islam which allowed things like murder of civilians and suicide bombings to be seen as holy acts.
These developments, which did not entirely end Soviet and US quest’s for domination in the Middle East, severely hampered these efforts due to the the two secular ideologies which form the governments of both which was seen as blasphemous on all sides of the Islamic civil war.