The Middle East During The Cold War

The shopping mall tocopherol During The frigid contendThe force of the rivalry between Soviet Union and join States in the shivery state of war distorted internal politics and exacerbated or complicated realmal conflicts. Indeed, the grafting of the regular army/USSR competition over pre-existing Middle east rivalries in some(prenominal) cases intensified them. At the same measure, though, and in just some cases, the Middle eastwardern policy-making lites themselves made use of the unwarmed War to pursue their own lodge ins of hegemony, guarantor or colonial emancipation. Following Khalidi (2009) in assuming that during the Cold War the level of penetration of the Soviet and American influence was proportional to the degree of the strategical importance of the region, I volition first discuss the strategic and geopolitical features of the Middle East. Secondly, I exit describe some significant historical events, in order to channelize how the Cold War system of system of logic affected the sphere and how it square upd the regions political reality, both from a regional and a domestic point of view.The parky War and the Middle EastThe Cold War dominated earthly concern politics from the end of the WW2 to the collapse of Soviet Union. On 5 walk 1946, when Churchill pronounced its famous speech at Westminster University, in Fulton, Missouri, describing Europe as divided by an iron curtain, with eastern Europe subjected to the Soviet subject and the West under American influence, the Cold War was already on going. For more than forty years, super causes competed ideologic solelyy, militarily, technologically and diplomatically. The effects of the rivalry extended all over the World, generating high degree of polarization and aggravating pre-existing conflicts. Although in that respect were no wars fought instantaneously by the cardinal superpowers, proxy confrontations occurred in southeasterly Asia, Central America, the Caribbe an, Africa and the Middle East.The Middle East was a primary battlefield of contention (Khalidi, 2009). Since WWII, superpowers were aware of its importance, in term of its strategic geographic location and its vast oilfields and gas deposits. In fact, from a geopolitical point of view, the region lays at the junction of three continents, immediately south to the border of Russia and the Caucasus and it is ring by four major seas, namely the Mediterranean, the Black and the Caspian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Before the end of the war, both United States and Soviet Union were already strategically interested in the Middle Easts oil reserve. In fact, not nevertheless at the time were the great powers the Worlds major oil producers (Khalidi, 2009), notwithstanding to a fault the war made them increasingly aware of the strategic parting oil had acquired in warfare. Their motorised forces, in fact, were crucially dependent on oil for their propulsion, as were their navies and air forces (Khalidi, 2009). Consequentially, they become intensely concerned about the risk of their supplies being denied by their enemies and about preserving them.Nonetheless, the regions importance in terms of military strategy and oil supply further established passim the Cold War. In the late 1950s and until the Cuban missiles crisis of 1962, American missiles ingress submarines were based in Turkey in the 1960s and for about a decade, when a longer range missiles technology became available, American submarines were in Spain, with Soviet antisubmarine naval forces and air units based in Egypt and Turkey. During the 1970s, the military and strategic territorial concern of both powers moved to the Arab Peninsula and the region bordering the Indian Ocean, where the bare-ass generation American missiles launching submarines were positioned (Khalid, 2009).Anyway, in the afterwardsmath of the WWII, United States and Soviet Union were already militarily and diplomatically engaged in the region, severally in Turkey, Saudi-Arabian Arabia and Iran, and Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The Middle East, thus, became a major firm of bitter rivalries between the great powers, the effects of which would deeply influence and shape its politics and historical dynamics.Conflicts, alliances, nuclear threats and the complex events which occurred in the Middle East during the Cold War were determined by the following underlying forces business organisation of the superpowers of being excluded from the control over the region their attempt to re sit Britains power in the Middle East anti-colonialism and the struggle of Middle Eastern states for the emancipation, which conduct to their alliances with the superpowers the emergence of Arab nationalism and the diffusion of the communist ideology. Ideology, indeed, played a innate graphic symbol. It was adopted both in terms of appeal made to authority allies and in terms of frugal, political and social models they offe red to them (Halliday in Sayigh and Shlaim, 1997). nonpareil of the events which reveal the pervasive effects of the international competition in the persona is The Arab cold war of 1958-1970, as Malcolm H. Kerr (1965) has called it. In the aftermath of the Suez crisis, in which both superpowers have supported Egypt and the Arab states against Israel, French and Britain, the pre-war Saudi-American relationship was cemented by the Eisenhower Doctrine and Saudi adherence to it. In his famous speech of January 1957, Eisenhower admitted the strategic importance of the area and denounced the Communist threat in the Middle East and Soviet Unions interest in power politics, which have become clearer with its involvement in the Suez crisis. Soviet political, economic and military aids were depicted by President Eisenhower as International Communisms instruments of domination (Eisenhower, 1957), apparently harmless means to manipulate topical anaesthetic instability for Soviet power-purpos e. Thus, he authorized the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such(prenominal) nations, requesting such aid, against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism (Eisenhower, 1957).The Saudi-American relation exacerbated Saudi relations with Nassers Egypt, a former(prenominal) non-aligned state which was moving closer to the Soviet Union. At the same time a heterogeneous agglomerate of political forces supported by the Soviet Union was formed, including not only communist and radical parties, but in addition nationalist, pan-Arab, anti-colonialist and bourgeois-democratic groups. In order to balance the secular and radical wave of Arab regimes, as Khalidi (2009) pointed out, Saudi Arabia and its ally United States adopted Islam and religious propaganda as ideological counter-weapon. In this way, Islam became a crucial tool of the American intelligence dur ing the Cold War. The result was a high degree of polarization in the Region, with the Soviet Union aligned with authoritarian nationalist regimes and USA supporting peremptory monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Arab Gulf States and authoritative regimes in Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia and Morocco.Another represent of the superpowers influence over regional politics in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although the origin of the conflict has little to do with superpowers rivalry (Halliday, the Cold War competition generated polarization around the issue, fuelling arms race and leading several times to the risk of a nuclear strike. In the first figure of Israel life, namely from its birth in 1948 to the Suez Crisis of 1956, superpowers competed in supporting Israel. Polarization occurred after 1956, with USA supporting Israel and Soviet Union supporting Arab States. The competition took place in terms of armaments supply and economic aids, with the stakes esc alating and culminating with the 1968-1970 and the 1973 wars, when Washington say nuclear alert for the last time in the history of the Cold War.Internally, cold war rivalries distorted economic decisions, domestic policies, social, military and political balances, with the superpowers being responsible of or supporting coups and internal rebellions (Khalidi, 2009). Religion and ideology have been instrumentalised in order to pursuit the Cold War logic of balance of power, with some impacts also on the growth of democracy. Indeed, there was no stress by the United States to promote democracy or gentleman rights in the area. USA itself covered or supported actions to subvert Middle Eastern democracies such as the American-Britishs coup in Iran, which brought down the take Mossadeq government and reinstalled the autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah in 1953. This behaviour was coherent with the American security tasks to preserve the Middle East from Communism and export the capitalist logic of free market tasks which could be effectively pursued by positioning with the wealthy and conservative local elites. Soviet Union, instead, worked attentively to encourage the increment of socialism and distributive logic in the area, trying to appeal to the working classes and local communist parties (Khalidi, 2009).An instance of the pervasive effect of rivalry at the domestic level is the case of Iran. Due to geographical contiguity, Iran felt interminably menaced by the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the war, though, communism was not perceived by the lites as good option for the development of the country. Thus, at the set about of the Cold War, United States security interests, coincided with the Iranian ones (). US supported Shah, whose conservative government led to absolutism, corruption and to political stagnation, which, combined with fast modernisation and social disruption, contributed to the rise of the Islamic Revolution. USSR also played a role in unde rmining the power of the Shah. As Rubinstein tells us, although Soviet Union did not directly interfere in the fall of the Shah, communist agents played an important role in spreading discontent in the Iranian oilfields, contributing to the economic paralysis, which undermined the pro-American government.However, concerning the case of Iran, two considerations must be done, which, to different extents, could be applied to several other cases in the region. First, the Cold War did not represent the first case of influence and penetration by a hegemonic power in Persia. In fact, for example, both Russia and Britain had great security and economic interest in the Persian Gulf and intervened several times in the country, both militarily and not. In 1907, in order to balance their influence, the two states agreed to divide Iran 1942, unsatisfied of its neutrality, they agreed to invade it.Secondly, not only the rivalry logic diverted Iranian domestic policy, but also Iranian (and not onl y) lites made use of the Cold War and of USA support in order to pursue their security goals and keep itself unaffiliated from the Soviet threat, which, as previous events show, had worried them long before the starting of the USA/USSR competition.Finally, as Halliday (1997) pointed out, the Cold War competition had also some other role in the region. It worked as a distraction, diverting attention from domestic problems, which could otherwise be earlier observed and solved. What emerged from the end of the competition and the mastery of the West, thus, is just a not distorted and more grasping cipher of the region and its pre-existent complexities.http//www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1957eisenhowerdoctrine.html (Eisenhower doctrine)