Middle East Instability

Report Outline
Interplay of Arab and World Rivalries
Factors Responsible for Instability
Effects of Cold War on Middle East

Interplay of Arab and World Rivalries

Since World War II no region of the world has produced more crises than the Middle East. Hardly a year has passed without outbreaks or threats of violence, internal or international, in which one or more of the great powers have been either active participants or anxious spectators. War of the Arab states against Israel, riots and revolution in Egypt, Anglo-French armed intervention at Suez, revolution in Iraq, American troop landings in revolt-ridden Lebanon, and lesser disturbances have punctuated the years. The Soviet Union, far from holding aloof, has helped with arms and propaganda to keep the region in turmoil.

East and West came to blows in Korea. That eventuality has been avoided so far in the Middle East, as in Europe, but the war of nerves has been nowhere more pervasive than around the eastern Mediterranean. Western Europe's dependence on Middle East oil, and on the short sea route to the Orient, has contributed on one side to concentrating power rivalries in this quarter; and the fact that Moscow now looks beyond traditional Russian goals in the Middle East toward new objectives in Africa has done the same on the other side.

Competition between East and West is by no means solely responsible for the succession of Middle East crises. Deep-reaching influences at work among the countries and peoples of the region itself have put in motion a process of governmental, economic, and social change which naturally has stirred all kinds of conflict between old and new. It is a period of ferment and instability made to order for designing foreign powers—but one which raises the fears of all other foreign powers with vital interests at stake. Until recently, Western apprehensions centered on apparent entanglement of Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser with the men of the Kremlin. Now the scene has shifted to Iraq, where Reds recently seemed on the point of taking over the government of Premier Abdel Karim Kassem and giving international communism its first direct foothold in the Middle Bast.