Cold War, post-Cold War: does it make a difference for the Middle East?

Abstract

While the euphoric predictions of a ‘New World Order’ and the ‘End of History’ have been buried in the alleys of Sarajevo and the killing fields of Rwanda and Chechnya, the end of the Cold War still constitutes the primary prism through which world affairs in general, and Middle Eastern events in particular, are observed. When in 1991 an American-led international coalition under the auspices of the United Nations expelled Iraq from the emirate of Kuwait, invaded and annexed six months earlier, this move was at once lauded as a confirmation of the New World Order, based on respect for and enforcement of international law, and castigated as an imperialist ploy by the United States, now ‘the only remaining superpower’, to impose its hegemony over the Persian Gulf and the Arab world as a whole. Likewise, the first-ever agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, was widely interpreted as a corollary of the end of the Cold War. To its proponents the accord represented the immeasurable potential for coexistence and cooperation generated by the end of superpower global rivalry; to its detractors, a humiliating pax Americana imposed on two disorientated and subservient clients.