Sowing Crisis, page 12
Similarly, the freezing of the decades-old civil war within China into a partition of the country between Communist and Nationalist China was in some measure a consequence of Cold War considerations. The Communists might have taken the island of Taiwan, as they did with Hainan Island in the spring of 1950, were it not for the belated American reaction driven largely by Cold War considerations. After the Communist takeover of China in 1949, the United States initially was not deeply committed to the Kuomintang government that had taken refuge on Taiwan. It was only after the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 that the U.S. Seventh Fleet was first interposed between the island and the mainland. While Communist China eventually escaped from some Cold War strictures in the wake of Nixon and Kissinger’s shrewd decision to play China against the USSR, this was only after the heavy-handed authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist regime had already been strongly reinforced by China’s direct involvement in the Korean War, and by China thereafter being drawn into subsequent Cold War confrontations with the United States. The remarkable blindness of American policymakers through the 1960s to the manifest differences between the regimes in Moscow and Beijing was in some measure a consequence of the self-inflicted damage to American expertise on China as a result of McCarthy-era hysteria. It was part of a larger insensitivity to the differences between many national communist parties that was due to the heavy ideological blinders rooted in fierce anticommunism that were worn by many of those in positions of responsibility in Washington.
Although Japan was spared internal civil strife and outright war after 1945, the impact of the Cold War strongly affected that country’s politics as well. The American occupation authorities were supremely concerned with turning Japan into a bastion against communism, just as they were in West Germany, while Moscow hoped to use the Japanese Communist Party for its own purposes. Thus the political process in Japan was distorted even more than might otherwise have been the case under a postwar American occupation. Moreover, especially once the Korean War began, Japanese industry was integrated into the American-dominated capitalist economy as part of the global confrontation with the Soviet bloc economies. This was done with little more attention than in Germany to the loyal role of the country’s industrialists and bankers in supporting the militaristic regime that fomented and waged World War II.
East Asian regional alignments developed during the Cold War have only begun, in the early twenty-first century, to shift, although some of them are still in place, notably the alignment of Japan with the United States and of Stalinist North Korea with China, not to speak of the ongoing deep gulf between China and Taiwan. Moreover, long after the Cold War has ended, efforts at a rapprochement between the two Koreas—originally divided as a result of an American-Soviet deal on the eve of the Cold War—have still met with some reticence in Washington. All of these are lasting results of the enormous impact of the Cold War on regional conflicts in East Asia.
In Southeast Asia, the impact of the Cold War was also massive and lasting. This was notably the case in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, where first France backed by Washington, and then the United States itself, waged decades-long, costly, and ultimately futile wars. They were both fighting against a Communist North Vietnamese regime that their leaders purported to see as no more than another tentacle of the international communist octopus, ignoring its anticolonialist and nationalist component. As in Korea, the devastation, the casualties, and the dislocation wrought by these two Indochinese wars constituted only part of the cost of the countries of Southeast Asia being sucked into the East-West rivalry. The political and social polarizations attendant on this larger conflict and the wars it produced helped to tear apart these societies, in particular that of Cambodia, whose ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, desperately tried and failed to prevent his country from being drawn into the maelstrom of the American war in Indochina. Intensive American bombing and American and North Vietnamese ground interventions in Cambodia in the end helped to produce the grotesque and murderous regime of Pol Pot. The Cold War also had a profound impact in other countries of the region like Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. In the latter in 1965 and 1966, the Indonesian Communist Party was subjected to a ferocious CIA-backed repression that cost the lives of perhaps half a million of its members and sympathizers.7
The Cold War rivalry between the superpower giants had a similar impact on the internal politics and regional rivalries of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and had many similarly harmful consequences.8 This impact is still felt long after the end of the Cold War in today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular. These two countries had the misfortune to be seen by both superpowers as primary battlefields in their competition with each other at the very end of the Cold War, with continuing tragic spillover effects on them and their neighbors, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although these three regions have received less attention in the scholarly literature as arenas of the East-West rivalry than did Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, the picture in all of them was largely the same as the ones I have just sketched out. Here, too, the superpowers aligned themselves with one or another faction in regional conflicts, supporting regimes of almost any nature that were willing to side with them (and sometimes, as with Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, changing sides more than once). Here, too, their heavy-handed intervention had a potent and generally negative effect on the internal politics of the countries concerned. In the cases of Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, domestic politics, regional alignments, and alliances with external powers are to this day still deeply distorted by the lingering aftereffects of the Cold War, although this almost never appears to be recognized by policymakers or pundits.
THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE COLD WAR
How did the Middle East differ from other regions that were important Cold War battlefields in terms of the impact of the superpower rivalry on its internal and regional politics? And in what specific ways was the Middle East affected by the kind of pressures generated by the Cold War that have already been briefly mentioned?
The Middle East had at least three characteristics that made it quite different from other areas of the world insofar as the competition between the superpowers was concerned. The first had to do with its location. As earlier chapters have shown, this region was particularly important to both superpowers, first because it abutted directly on the vital southern flank of the Soviet Union. From the Soviet perspective, this meant that there was no buffer of satellite states as in Eastern Europe, nor a vast territorial expanse like that of eastern Siberia, to shelter the economically and strategically critical regions in the west and south of the country. In consequence, the Urals regions and the southern underbelly of the USSR, where much of the country’s vital industries and oil resources were concentrated, and whose vulnerability had only recently been revealed during the first years of World War II, were directly exposed to American power. This was especially true of overwhelmingly superior American air power in the early years of the Cold War, and of American nuclear-tipped missiles in a later era. From the Western perspective, these same geographical realities meant that both the Middle East and adjoining seas were important as possible bases for offensive strategic weapons systems, like Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) and Polaris and Poseidon submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
The strategic value of the Middle East to the superpowers in this regard actually fluctuated over the course of the Cold War, with the ebb and flow of technological developments. We have seen in chapters 1 and 2 that immediately after World War II, the region provided bases for American strategic bombers carrying nuclear weapons targeting the southern USSR. In time, as strategic bombers with greater range came into service, bases for them in the Middle East ceased to be necessary. For a period in the late 1950s and the 1960s, American Jupiter IRBMs were based in Turkey (they were removed in the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as part of a top-secret deal between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev)9 and the Polaris SLBM became a major weapons system in the American nuclear arsenal. This missile had a range that permitted it to reach targets in the southern regions of the USSR from the eastern Mediterranean, and as a result this sea briefly once again became a subject of intense strategic interest to both superpowers. For much of this period, American Polaris missile-launching submarines were based at Rota in Spain, while Soviet antisubmarine naval and air units tasked with shadowing these submarines were based at Alexandria in Egypt and at the Syrian port of Tartus. The American military was naturally preoccupied with this Soviet presence in the region, as was the Soviet military with that of the Americans. The resulting secret, silent underwater rivalry in fact was behind much of the maneuvering of the two superpowers in parts of the Middle East for about a decade.
During the 1970s, however, the Polaris SLBM was superseded by the longer-range Poseidon SLBM. A new generation of American missile-launching submarines carrying the Poseidon was thereupon deployed in the Indian Ocean, whence they had the range to strike previously unreachable targets in Soviet central Asia. In consequence, the areas bordering that ocean, including parts of the Middle East, like the coastal waters around the Arabian Peninsula, and ports like Aden, where Soviet naval vessels were based, replaced the Mediterranean as a primary strategic focus of both superpowers. Thereafter, with the deployment of the even longer-range Trident SLBM, which could be based even farther away from the USSR, the greater Middle East became a less vital arena in the strategic-weapons race between the superpowers. The strategic importance of the region to the superpowers in terms of the central nuclear balance between them was thereafter often conjunctural rather than constant.
At the same time as it served at times as a launching pad for weapons targeting the USSR, the Middle East was seen by Western planners as a source of strategic vulnerability. This was because the Soviet frontiers abutted directly on two key Middle Eastern countries that rapidly came to constitute part of the Western alliance system designed to “contain” the power of the USSR, both of them perceived as relatively weak and vulnerable in the early Cold War years: Turkey and Iran. Moreover, as we have seen, at the end of World War II Soviet troops were already in Iran and left only tardily, and the USSR (and to some extent its partners) still bore a grudge against Turkey for its very late adhesion to the Allied cause during the war. This concern was magnified by the increasing tendency of Western policymakers to see Stalin as reprising the southward drive of Russian power toward “warm waters.” There was additionally an abiding fear of the massive Red Army, based on its crushing defeat of the Wehrmacht over the years 1942–45, which for Western forces in the Middle East translated into a concern about the ability of Soviet ground forces to drive rapidly south to the Gulf and the Mediterranean in case of war.
Their perceived vulnerabilities in the Middle East explain in part the concerns of both superpowers about this region, concerns that were perhaps more acute than regarding any other region of the world except Europe itself, where by May 1945 the Red Army had succeeded in pushing the effective frontier of Soviet power far to the west. Given the almost paranoid defensiveness of Stalin, and the age-old Russian anxiety about the country’s vulnerability to attacks from all directions, it can be understood why the Middle East was so important to the Soviets. By contrast, this sense of vulnerability, and its grave accentuation as a result of the fearsome initial successes of Hitler’s drives eastward in 1941–42, was almost completely ignored in Washington and Western capitals as a motivation for Soviet actions. Instead, the enormous new military power of the USSR, the Red Army’s grinding and relentless advance westward against the formidable Wehrmacht during the last years of the war, and the ideological hostility and apparent aggressiveness the Soviets exhibited in the wake of the war were held up as reasons to fear and contain the potentials of the Soviet Union in the Middle East.
There was a second, linked, aspect to the strategic importance of the Middle East besides its location on the southern flanks of the Soviet Union, one that I have also touched on in other contexts. This was the region’s vital historic role as a passageway for East-West transit, whether by land, sea, or air. Put very simply, it was a vital corridor for movement between America and Europe on the one hand and South and East Asia on the other. The critical nature of this aspect had just been dramatically underlined by the events of World War II. Although this reality had been apparent to European strategic thinkers for at least a century and a half, at least since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, it was newly prominent in the thinking of American strategic planners adjusting to the new postwar reality of the United States as a power with interests and military forces spread over the entire globe. At the same time as American planners appreciated the vital importance of the Middle East for the worldwide projection of their air and sea power, it also constituted a potential cork blocking the expansion of Soviet sea-power and seaborne influence southward, a role this region had played vis-à-vis Russia since the eighteenth century. This was a fact of which American strategists quickly became aware, as had been European ones for over a century, and of which Soviet planners were as aware as had been those of imperial Russia.10 Nor was the importance of the Middle East as a key arena for the operation of the international system discussed in the last chapter lost on American policymakers as they became more and more conscious of global realities and the increasingly dominant position of the United States in that system.
Third and finally, as I laid out in chapter 2, the countries of the Middle East contained, and still contain, most of the world’s reserves of oil and gas. The extent of this area’s hydrocarbon reserves was suspected but not fully known before World War II. Within a few years, after further exploration by Western oil companies, the full extent of the region’s richness in this domain began to become apparent. Today, the Middle East contains 61.5 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, with 22 percent of the total in Saudi Arabia alone.11 Given the two strategic considerations just mentioned, as well as the perceived insufficiency of Western Hemisphere oil reserves to meet the demands of the American economy, the need for oil to fuel the rebuilding of the war-devastated economies of Western Europe and Japan (a crucial Western Cold War objective), and the large profits of the multinationals that dominated the oil industry,12 it can be seen why for the first time in history, events within the Middle East were a matter of abiding interest to American policymakers. And none of this was lost on Soviet policymakers, whom we have seen had their own strategic energy considerations, and understood perfectly the importance of Middle Eastern oil to the capitalist world economy.
Given these three reasons for the significance of the Middle East to both superpowers, it was thus not a coincidence that among the first major postwar moves by the Soviet Union outside the spheres allotted to it by wartime Allied agreement were its interventions in the internal politics of Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan and its demands on Iran for oil concessions, both discussed in chapter 2. Nor was it a coincidence that the first major covert American intelligence operation abroad should have been in Iran in 1953, leading to the overthrow of the Mosaddeq government, which had nationalized that country’s oil. Well before 1953, however, we have seen that both the United States and the Soviet Union had already become deeply involved in the regional politics of the Middle East, and in the internal affairs of several Middle Eastern countries, notably Iran and Turkey. The Middle East, while undoubtedly not as important in the calculations of either side in the Cold War as was Europe, nevertheless clearly had its own specificity, and was an area to which they devoted serious concern. In some respects, indeed, this region was of unique interest to them, and it was certainly not just another third world arena in their global rivalry.13
How then did this rivalry affect the Middle East over the course of the Cold War? I would begin by suggesting that its impact on the countries of the Middle East might have been particularly significant given a characteristic of the region that is not often appreciated: its long-standing and deep involvement in world politics, and the long-standing and deep involvement of great powers in its internal affairs. In the words of Princeton historian L. Carl Brown, “For roughly the last two centuries, the Middle East has been more consistently and more thoroughly ensnarled in great power politics than any other part of the non-Western world…. Other parts of the world have been at one time or another more severely buffeted by an imperial power, but no area has been so unremittingly caught up in multilateral great power politics.” Brown concludes that in consequence “the Middle East is the most penetrated international relations sub-system in today’s world,” by which he means a system “that is neither effectively absorbed by the outside challenger nor later released from the outsider’s smothering embrace,” and which “exists in continuous confrontation with a dominant outside political system.”14
In view of this perceptive observation, and of the devastating effects that such penetration has had on Middle Eastern politics, I will assess the impact of the superpower rivalry in the Middle East in two major domains: first, in this chapter, how the Cold War affected regional interstate politics, and second, in the following chapter, how it affected the internal politics of the countries of the region. Although these domains are interrelated in many ways, it is possible and indeed desirable to analyze them separately. In this chapter I will examine briefly three of the most important regional conflicts affected by the Cold War: that between the Arabs and Israel; the 1975–90 war in Lebanon; and the war between Iran and Iraq. The next chapter will follow with an assessment of the impact of the Cold War on the internal politics of a selected number of states in the region.
