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 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.

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.

The intellectual and political roots of Western Europe’s post-World War II integration process in Europe reach to post-World War I period. Two world wars had brought physical destruction, socio-economic dislocation, and global decline. Breaking this cycle of self-destructive behavior required overcoming the Franco-German antagonism. As early as the 1920s, smaller and middle countries in Western Europe grew concerned about Soviet expansionism and the obstructionist policies of the United Kingdom. But London insisted on its unfettered great power status in Europe beyond well beyond WW II. From 1947 to 1961, it tried to impose its views on the integration project. Given its waning global influence, it was forced to ask the West European continentals to join the integration project afterwards. France was the most consistent proponent of integration since the 1920s. With the encouragement of the United States, it shaped European integration after WW II with the double goal of restoring itself to great power status and of holding an integrated Germany down after having fought three wars with it in less than a century. The role of the United States was crucial for the success of post-World War II integration.

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the two halves of divided Europe overcame their parallel economic crises. Ballooning Eastern European debt to the non-socialist world, the Polish Crisis in 1980-81, and the economic impact of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq-Iran War permanently undermined Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. By late 1981, the USSR had neither the economic means nor the military stomach to maintain its influence by brute force. As a consequence, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany turned to the western world for credit and economic advice, which in turn accelerated the erosion of Soviet dominance. At the same time, western countries underwent a conservative transformation that partially helped to overcome the economic crises of the late 1970s that had emerged in the aftermath of the American abolition of the Bretton Woods system and the two Middle East oil shocks. In the 1980s, they emerged strengthened in economy terms and unified against the final Soviet attempt to seek supremacy in all of Europe through the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Europe. The structures for the end of the regional Cold War were in place.

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.

Nuclear weapons secured status in international affairs throughout the Cold War. The USSR and the United Kingdom acquired them to retain a status equal to the United States after 1945. By the 1960s, the United States and the USSR formed a nuclear superpower duopoly, while the United Kingdom lost its status due to its financial shortages. The PRC, Israel, and France embarked on nuclear projects in the mid-1950s to acquire respect from the USSR, the United States, regional rivals, or any combination thereof. By the late 1950s, Washington and Moscow grew concerned about nuclear proliferation and took action to impose an international non-proliferation regime in the 1960s. Still, China’s first successful test in October 1964 triggered India’s decision to go nuclear in an attempt to restore equal status, which in turn convinced Pakistan to seek nuclear weapons. In the early 1970s, the two superpowers negotiated on the limitation of their nuclear arsenals but still remained in a class of nuclear powers by themselves. With the NATO double-track decision of 1979, West Germany recommitted the United States to Western Europe’s security through the establishment of a regional nuclear deterrent.

“Most empirical studies on trust examine the influence of certain variables (such as age, sex, education, or ethnicity) on trust at a specific moment in a specific segment of the population. However, only data collected from a representative sample of the general population over an extended period (longitudinal data) can reasonably tell us whether overall trust has declined or not. In this chapter, the authors present the two best longitudinal studies. Both come from opinion poll institutions: one from the United States (Harris Poll®), the other from the United Kingdom (Ipsos MORI®). The results of both studies are analysed and presented in graphic form. This involves a short critical analysis as to how the seeming differences between the studies are, in effect, due to methodological differences and disappear once these differences are taken into account. Although the data are fairly limited, there is still sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that trust (albeit a folk understanding of what trust is) in physicians has declined across Western countries, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, since the 1960s.