IGCSE History

• Home
• Introduction to IGCSE
• The Road to Affluence: USA 1917 - 1941 (A9)
  • 1917 - 1929
    • The impact of the First World War
    • Immigration
    • Henry Ford and mass production
    • Farming in the 1920s
    • The Stock Market Boom
  • 1929 - 1941
    • The Wall Street Crash
    • The Depression
    • The policies of Hoover
    • Roosevelt and the New Deal
    • Reactions to the New Deal
• International Relations 1919-1939 (A8)
  • Collective Security
    • The Versailles Settlement
    • The Foundation of the League of Nations
    • Strengths and weaknesses of the League of Nations
    • Successes and failures of the League of Nations
    • Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact
  • Appeasement
    • Manchuria
    • The Disarmament Conference
    • Abyssinia
    • Hitler and the League
    • Appeasement in action
• Revolution in China 1949 - 1996 (A14)
  • 1949 - 1976
    • China under Mao
    • Reform under Liu and Deng
    • The reasons for the Cultural Revolution
    • The impact of the Cultural Revolution
    • China 1971 - 1976
  • 1976 - 1996
    • The defeat of the Gang of Four
    • China under Deng Xiaoping
    • Reforms of the economy
    • The Democracy Movement
    • China in the 1990s
• South-East Asia 1945 - 1900 (A15)
  • Indo-China
    • The end of the French Empire
    • Vietnam 1954 - 1965
    • US involvement in Vietnam
    • The unification of Vietnam
    • Laos and Cambodia
  • South-East Asia
    • The struggle for control of Malaya
    • The creation of Malaysia
    • Singapore
    • Suharto and Indonesia
    • Sukarno and Pancasila
• Conflict and Crisis is the Middle East 1946 - 1996 (A16)
  • Unit overview
  • 1946 - 1967
    • The creation of Israel
    • The impact of the war of 1948 - 1949
    • The Suez Crisis
    • Superpower involvement in the Middle East
    • The Six Day War
  • 1967 - 1996
    • International terrorism
    • The war of Yom Kippur
    • The Palestinian Liberation Organisation
    • Lebanon and the occupied territories
    • Successes and failures from Camp David to Oslo
• The First World War (B4)
  • The Schlieffen Plan
  • Deadlock on the Western Front
  • Gallipoli
  • The Somme and Passchendaele
  • The War at Sea
  • The defeat of Germany
• The USA 1917-1929 (B7)
  • The Roaring Twenties
  • Advertising and consumerism
  • New forms of entertainment
  • Prohibition
  • Gangsterism
  • Hollywood
• China under Mao Zedong 1949 - 1959 (B10)
  • The creation of the Communist State
  • Land Reform
  • Communist society
  • The First Five Year Pan
  • The 100 Flowers
  • The Great Leap Forward
• The Changing Nature of Warfare (C3)
  • Unit overview
  • Warfare at the beginning of the 20th Century
  • Land warfare
  • Sea and aerial warfare
  • Atomic and nuclear weapons
  • Warfare at the end of the 20th Century
• Links

Superpower involvement in the Middle East

The Suez crisis had serious consequences in the Middle East. The Arab League, an organisation that represented all of the Arab countries, pledged its support for Nasser and Arab hostility to Israel increased still further. There were also important changes in other parts of the Middle East, which had traditionally supported the West. The pro-western regime in Iraq was overthrown in 1958 and Syria and Libya both began to look to the Soviet Union for military aid. In 1958 Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic, this lasted for three years until a coup in Syria in 1961. Nasser hoped that this would be the basis for the Pan-Arab movement that he dreamed of. In 1964 Nasser supported the setting up of the Palestine Liberation Organisation

The Suez Crisis led to Superpower involvement in the Middle East on a large scale. From being a Middle Eastern issue, relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours became a potential international crisis point. To try to protect Israel and other countries from Soviet influence, the Eisenhower Doctrine was announced in 1957; this offered US aid to any country in the Middle East threatened by communism. At the same time the Soviet Union began to send military advisers to Egypt. By 1970 there were an estimated 20,000 and military aid worth more than $12,000,000,000 had been sent to the Arab countries. All the equipment and weapons lost by Syria and Egypt in the wars of 1967 and 1973 were apparently immediately replaced by the Soviet Union.

After the Six Day War the Superpowers became even more involved in the Middle East. With the increased hostility felt by the Arab states, the Soviet Union saw the opportunity of gaining even more influence in an area that had traditionally been pro-western. From 1968 to 1973 the Soviet Union sent $2,600,000,000 worth of aid to the Arab states of Syria and Egypt. This included 650 Soviet warplanes and 2,500 tanks going to Egypt and 330 warplanes and 2,000 tanks going to Syria. Inevitably, increased Soviet aid to the Arabs meant increased American aid to Israel. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the USA sent $2,000,000,000 to Israel. The Middle East had now became an important part of the Cold War.

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