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The Cold War and the Middle East

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Abstract

The Cold War has been researched in minute detail and written about at great length but it remains one of the most elusive and enigmatic conflicts of modern times. With the ending of the Cold War, it is now possible to review the entire post-war period, to examine the Cold War as history. The Middle East occupies a special place in the history of the Cold War. It was critical to its birth, its life and its demise. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it became one of the major theatres of the Cold War on account of its strategic importance and its oil resources. The key to the international politics of the Middle East during the Cold War era is the relationship between external powers and local powers. Most of the existing literature on the subject focuses on the policies of the Great Powers towards the local region. The Cold War and the Middle East redresses the balance by concentrating on the policies of the local actors. It looks at the politics of the region not just from the outside in but from the inside out. The contributors to this volume are leading scholars in the field whose interests combine International Relations and Middle Eastern Studies.

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... While rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Iran and among GCC member states feature prominently in scholarship (Cordesman andObaid 2005, Mason 2017), the 'African front'as one Qatari ambassador called it 2has received only peripheral attention, if any. Gulf Studies has concentrated on the ways in which local players absorbed and manipulated superpower agendas (Sayigh and Shlaim 1997) and on how Middle Eastern states and non-state actors have confronted each other, domestically and transnationally (Brown 1984, Walt 1987. Only recently, owing to the Yemen war, the Saudi-Emirati excommunication of Qatar in June 2017 and the bidding of Abu Dhabi, Doha, Riyadh and Tehran for the loyalties of governments in the Horn, has interest increased in how the Gulf and Africa relate to each other as security arenas. ...
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U.S.-middle east relations;cold war dynamics;anti-american nationalism;revolutions;preservation of Israel
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