The Cold War did not cause the conflicts in the Middle East, particularly the one between Israel and the Arab states. The Zionist state building project rooted in the anti-Semitism of the emerging European nation states of the late 19th century, employed British imperialism as a vehicle, and derived its moral urgency from the Holocaust. But it triggered the Palestinian displacement. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported the UN partition proposal in 1947 and recognized Israel within a year. Still, they supported Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956. The United States was concerned about the possible growth of Soviet influence in the region, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Its joint effort with the United Kingdom to build up an anti-Soviet alliance system divided the Arab world while it alienated both Israel and Egypt. In the end, the pre-emptive anti-Soviet alliance making helped destabilize the Middle East and allowed the USSR to enter the region. Although the Suez Crisis terminated British imperial influence, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were able to benefit from it by making significant inroads in the following decade.

The end of the Soviet-American competition not only seemed to occur unexpectedly but also destroyed near-unshakable assumptions about the long-lasting nature of the Cold War. Structural change in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe had put in place the conditions, under which the superpower conflict could actually have ended by in the first half of the 1980s. But why, then, did the superpower conflict still take so long to end? Both superpowers were Cold Warriors almost until the very end. American-centric interpretations of a US victory in the Cold War to the contrary, the USSR decided to end it. Although the last Soviet leader originally sought to reform and strengthen the Soviet Union, by 1988 he realized that this goal was unattainable.

The three Great Powers at the end of World War II and the two superpowers after the mid 1960s experienced tight limits to their political, economic and military power. They were usually most successful if they were able to influence pre-existing regional developments. Particularly the Middle East defied outside influence. Conflicts and developments usually fell into one of three categories: those without Cold War roots, those dating back to the Bolshevik challenge of 1917, and those caused by the Cold War after World War II. Over the course of four decades until the late 1980s, they collectively affected structural change. However, middle powers and smaller agents enjoyed different levels of agency, ranging from much influence, like communist China, to minute, like the Palestinians. Yet, in general, agency steadily increased over the course of the Cold War.

Almost a decade ago, when I attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre in Berlin, the narrative structure of this book emerged before my eyes. Wagner’s idea of a network of stories that intersect and influence each other has fascinated me since the early 1990s when I first saw the complete performance of his four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Its second part, Die Walküre, sparked my vision of writing a reinterpretation of the Cold War as an interconnected set of narratives that focuses on how middle and smaller actors at the regional level shaped that global conflict.

At the end of World War II, the Big Three agreed on Germany’s territorial reduction and division, and the territorial westward relocation of Poland. Poland received the German territories of southern East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with the Oder and Neisse rivers forming its new western border. The Big Three also decided to divide the remainder of Germany into occupation zones—a decision that, however, predetermined the country’s divided fate until 1990. At their birth in 1949, both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were firmly convinced that the nation’s division would be temporary. The Korean War cemented the nation’s division. Afterwards, West Germany tried to prevent East Germany’s attempt at seeking separate statehood. The East German closure of the borders in the divided capital Berlin in 1961 deepened the division. Starting in late 1969, West Germany acknowledged the reality of the two German states but denied the existance of two German nations. Although recognition in 1972-73 had been a long-term goal of the GDR, it also brought the danger of economic and political embracement by the FRG.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the United Kingdom considered the Middle East the linchpin to maintain its control over its imperial possessions around the Indian Ocean. In the interwar period, if fortified control through the mandate system of the League of Nations, turned on its imperialist partner France in 1945 to gain exclusive influence, and supported the creation of the Arab League during WW II. Originally, during the 1930s, the United Kingdom had rejected the idea to create an Arab organization as a threat to its imperial interest, but eventually supported it as the best option to secure its long-term strategic objectives. Yet, British support for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine since WW I, its endorsement of the creation of Israel after WW II, its involvement in creating anti-Soviet alliances in the early 1950s, and finally its imperialist attempt to regain direct control in the Middle East during the Suez Crisis undermined its political and military sway. Afterwards, the Arab League emerged as an organization unaffiliated with any great power from outside of the region, although it remained internally split until 1964.

What are the legacies of the Cold War in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe? In general, there are two kinds. One includes direct legacies of the Cold War, i.e. policies, structures, organizations, etc. which the ideological conflict had created. This includes the general decline of the left at a global scale, the rise of new forms of conservatism, democratization particularly in Asia and Europe, the internationalization of a subset of human rights included in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, and nuclear disarmament. The other category comprises legacies that had roots mainly elsewhere but were shaped by the Cold War. In particular, this concerns the long-term legacies of colonialism in Indochina, South Asia, and the Middle East. Yet, only the Muslim world has spawned its own intellectual framework connecting the pre-1945 time to the post-1991 period—in the form of competing versions of pan-Islamism. Although Catholicism in Europe displayed a similar potential during the Cold War, Papal dream of a re-Christianization of the continent were not fulfilled.

After the Nakba in 1947-49 and the Naksa in 1967, 900,000 Palestinians lived in other Arab states. As a long-term result of the British suppression of the Arab revolt in 1936-39, Palestinians lacked leadership for two decades. The Arab League claimed decision-making in all Palestinian affairs. Independent Palestinian organizations emerged in exile by the late 1950s, though the Arab League ignored them when it created the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964. The PLO expected that the June War would establish a Palestinian state in Israel’s place. The rapid Arab defeat dashed Palestinian hopes, but liberated the PLO from Arab tutelage. By early 1969, one of the exile organizations, Yassir Arafat’s Fatah, assumed PLO leadership. Under its leadership, the PLO almost took over Jordan in 1970, but was forced to relocate to Lebanon. When Egypt withdrew from Arab leadership in Palestinian affairs around that time, the PLO altered its heavy reliance on revolution and started to eye a negotiated solution with Israel. Even if the PLO obtained observer status at the United Nations in late 1974, the prospect of establishing a state in all of former Mandate Palestine had vanished.

At the end of World War II, three countries dominated the world. Though declining, the United Kingdom sought to preserve its global empire. The cautious Soviet Union acted as a rising revolutionary power. The reformist United States aimed at decolonization and the restoration of prosperity under its own leadership. The world’s Cold War division emerged in the next dozen years. Ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions divided Europe and East Asia in the late 1940s. The outbreak of Korean War—a local conflict at the world’s periphery—in 1950 triggered American alliance building around the communist world, including the People’s Republic of China. As the United States completed its ring of containment from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and South East Asia to the East Asian rim by 1955, the post-Stalin Soviet Union tried to relax Cold War tensions, but without much success. The Suez Crisis, which was partially triggered by British imperial pretensions, opened the Middle East to the Cold War, undermined British global standing, damaged American interests, and presented the Soviet Union with an unexpected triumph in the global Cold War.

The decade after 1964 witnessed two major cataclysmic conflicts—the June War in 1967 and the October War in 1973. Since 1964, American and Soviet influence in the Middle East was growing while the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors deepened, leading to June War in 1967 and the subsequent three-year Israeli-Arab stalemate. As the Socialist Camp and Free World lined up behind the Arab side and Israel, respectively, in the June War, the global Cold War superimposed itself on the preexisting regional conflict. Until the fall of 1970, superpower antagonism supported local actors in buttressing the Israeli-Arab stalemate. Egypt’s decision to seek a unilateral arrangement with Israel in late 1970 required the prior weakening of Soviet influence in the region. Thus, while Middle Eastern countries had enticed the superpowers to permeate the region in the second half of the 1960s, one of regional actors—Egypt—took active steps to push one of the hegemons and, in the process, the Cold War out of the region again. When Cairo was unable to engage Washington diplomatically, it decided to go to war in October 1973 to force the Middle East conflict onto the American agenda.