Cold War and the Middle East

The United States was primarily interested in the Middle East for economic and strategic reasons.  The discovery of huge pools of crude oil in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia during the first half of the twentieth century prompted America’s largest petroleum firms to obtain concessions in the Middle East. Similarly, America wanted to take the control of vulnerable Middle East regions in order to thwart the Soviet/Communist influence which could potentially fill the vacuum created by slow-motion withdraw of British and French from its empires in the Middle East after second World War. Some Middle Eastern countries had geographical proximity with the Soviet Union, and it was essential for the United States not to let the influence spill over to the other neighboring gulf countries. 

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The historian Albert Hourani says,"[He] who rules the Near East rules the world and he who has interests in the world are bound to concern himself with the Near East." Thus, the Middle East was more important than other regions, for it served economic as well as strategic interests; was geographically connected to other important regions such as Asia, Africa and, Europe; and was  politically more radical than other regions. I will answer the above questions specific to some Middle East countries—Israel, Iran, and Egypt.

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America wanted to use Israel as a strategic asset, as an ambitious quest to promote regional defense, as a preventive shield against communism in the Middle East, as a trusted and stable ally in the development/ containment of nuclear weapon, as a market for the products of the American defense industry, and as a laboratory for experimentation of democratic values. Israel is the biggest ally in the Middle East and maintains similar relations with the United States as it used to do in the Cold War Era. In Egypt, the United States was distrustful of the regime of Gamal Abd al-Nasser after the Egyptian Revolution deposed King Faruq. The U.S. expressed distaste for the government of Nasser and his policies of non-alignment, nationalism and Arab socialism as US interest was in towards imperialism and consequently in the control of the Suez Canal. The U.S.-Egyptian suffered until the death of Nasser.

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“To ensure the Rovers, Citroens, and Volkswagens continued to roll along the highways of Western Europe and that V-8s continued to roll off the assembly lines in Detroit”, America required oil from Middle Eastern countries. Concerned about the growing Soviet influence in Iran, the United States toppled the nationalist regime of Mohammed Mossadeq which had tried to nationalize Iranian oil. The US-appointed young Mohammed Reza Shah as the Prime Minister for their security and economic interest. Nixon adopted a twin pillars policy in which Iran and Saudi Arabia would serve as anti-Soviet regional proxies. A 1979 Islamist revolution against the Shah's regime swept a new kind of Islamic state into power governed by Islamic jurists and scholars. After this revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Nixon doctrine revealed the limitation of such an arrangement, and the U.S officials decided to stand alone with the Carter Doctrine, a policy reminiscent of President Henry Truman’s approach, with American cast in Britain’s role.

Nuclear Weapon and Cold War

The Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union up until 1962 boiled down to nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at the center stage of political and military tactics during the Cold War era as well. At the end of the 1940s, American monopoly in nuclear weapons was technically over after a specially equipped U. S. weather plane detected radioactivity in the Soviet air space above Siberia. This finding clearly indicated that the USSR was then in a nuclear race with the United States and that the United States could no longer act assertively in the world on the leverage of Nuclear weapons alone.

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Administrators from both countries were pushing for the development of nuclear weapons in order to gain a military advantage. When the possibility of developing the nuclear weapons that could trigger an explosion of far greater magnitude than that created by fission was claimed by Scientists, President Truman had authorized a special committee to investigate the possibility of building a hydrogen bomb, amidst several critics. A few months earlier, the Soviet Union had also successfully tested its atomic bomb. Similarly, Nuclear weapons gained major domestic political interests in the United States, and its development was used as a political tool to usurp the power by political players. For example, Kennedy claimed that the US was behind the Soviet Union in the nuclear race even though he possessed clear evidence that the United States held the lead.

The role of a nuclear weapon was first evident in the United States’ reluctance to attack China which was a major Soviet ally. Even though Truman had a clear policy of communist containment, Truman turned away from starting the war with Mao’s china which was father more communist threat than the Korean Peninsula. A key explanation lies not on any diminishing American interest in economic expansion but on the apparent knowledge of the nuclear capacity of the Soviet Union.

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Following nuclear crises between 1958 and 1962 further prove that nuclear weapons had defined the Cold War the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union at least up until 1962. First is the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. In response to the United States’ attempt to bring down Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba and the United States’ deployment of nuclear missiles in Turkey, West Germany, and other European Countries not far from Russian borders, the Soviet Union had strategically stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba in order to threaten the United States.

            Even though Eisenhower had backed down later, the U.S Seventh Fleet in 195 envisioned responding to a major Chinese attack with nuclear strikes deep into communist China resulting in millions of non-combatant casualties, had the Communist China attacked Quemoy- Matsu. Meanwhile, the idea of commencement of the general nuclear war was vocal after the Soviet Ultimatum to leave East Berlin. Luckily, the creation of the Berlin wall averted the possibility. As Kennedy said the wall was a hell lot better than the prospect of nuclear war.

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Even though nuclear weapons wrecked tensions in the then political realm, it, in retrospect, became the perfect means of avoiding the major wars. Since both sides understood their opponent’s capability to launch a devastating attack, this nuclear development laid theNuc way for Mutual Assured Destruction which restrained them from attacking each other. Had it not been for the understanding of eminent destruction that would have followed the nuclear war, the “Cold War” would have definitely lost its first name. Thus, nuclear weapons definitely define the Cold War.