The new Cold War history has begun to reshape the ways that international historians approach the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the post-1945 era. Rather than treating the region as exceptional, a number of scholars have sought to focus on the historical continuities and transnational connections between the Middle East and other areas of the Third World.Footnote ¹ This approach is based on the notion that the MENA region was enmeshed in the transnational webs of communication and exchange that characterized the post-1945 global system. Indeed, the region sat not only at the crossroads between Africa and the Eurasian landmass but also at the convergence of key global historical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Without denying cultural, social, and political elements that are indeed unique to the region, this scholarship has drawn attention to the continuities, connections, and parallels between the Middle Eastern experience and the wider world.

The study of foreign-relations history has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War. What began as the hope of settling the long-standing debate about the origins of the superpower conflict with the anticipated opening of Soviet archives after 1991 shifted to an increased attention on internationalizing the study of the post-1945 era. At the heart of this “new” Cold War international history sat the conviction that if scholars were to truly understand the superpower conflict, then they must draw from a multilingual, multiarchival source base. In practical terms, historians sought to understand the Cold War as it appeared not only in Washington but also in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and Beijing. Soon, these efforts expanded to take account of the views from Hanoi, Havana, Accra, New Delhi, Algiers, Cairo, and Beirut. This latter development marked the rise of a pericentric approach to the Cold War, in which scholars sought to understand the conflict by studying how it played out in the “periphery” rather than in the “core.” By the middle of the last decade, this led some scholars to suggest that the Cold War was perhaps more significant for its impact on the Third World than for its effects in the First and Second.Footnote ²

One of the touchstones of this new scholarship—articulated most notably by Odd Arne Westad—is the proposition that the emergence of the Third World sat at the juncture of two of the defining global historical movements of the 20th century: decolonization and the Cold War.Footnote ³ The struggle against colonialism imbued the nations of the Third World with a degree of commonality and shared experience despite their historical, social, and cultural diversity. As the system of European world empires crumbled, it was replaced with a new global order dominated by the United States and Soviet Union. The Cold War thus reconstructed—at least in part—some of the connective tissue of European imperialism. As the formerly colonized nations of the Third World began to chart their own cultural, social, and political courses, they would not do so in isolation from each other or from the superpowers. It thus comes as no surprise that these postcolonial states often adopted parallel trajectories.

The most obvious and most cited example of this phenomenon came with Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's emergence onto the regional and world stage. After coming to power with the Free Officer's movement—which historian Vijay Prashad describes as the prototypical colonel's coup—al-Nasir gained global attention as one of the key participants at the 1955 Bandung Conference.Footnote ⁴ In doing so, he gained a seat alongside Sukarno and Nehru as one of the founders of 1950s tier-mondisme and the Non-Aligned Movement. Much like other postcolonial leaders of his day, al-Nasir would place his faith in the power of the progressive state—propelled by the nationalization of domestic industries and resources—as the key engine of development and modernization. Meanwhile, the 1956 Suez Crisis would come to represent one of the most dramatic and direct examples of the convergence of decolonization and Cold War conflict.

Like his contemporaries, however, al-Nasir's star would be eclipsed by the emergence of a radical new generation of postcolonial nationalists. My own work approaches the emergence of the PLO within the context of a global wave of national liberation movements that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than treating the PLO—and the larger Arab–Israeli dispute, for that matter—as sui generis, this approach locates the Palestinian fedayeen within the global landscape of political upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s. Palestinian guerillas drew on the revolutionary models of Chinese, Cuban, Algerian, and Vietnamese fighters and refined their own mode of revolutionary violence that exploited the increasingly interconnected global system of the 1970s. Moreover, by accessing a transnational network that linked Beijing, Hanoi, Havana, and Algiers with radical groups in Europe and the United States, Palestinian fighters gained the material and political support they would need to push their cause in international forums like the United Nations.Footnote ⁵

This is not exclusively a story of anticolonial revolution, however. The MENA region also contains numerous examples of collaboration with the United States and the former European imperial powers. The Baghdad Pact was the Middle Eastern incarnation of Washington's efforts to establish regional security networks throughout the Cold War periphery as barricades against Moscow's influence. In the 1960s, Israel emerged as a model for the type of regional police power that became an integral component of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's version of a post-Vietnam containment strategy. Articulated in the Nixon Doctrine, these local forces—which came to include Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Jordan—played a role in Washington's efforts to contain the forces of Third World radicalism around the globe.Footnote ⁶

The transformation of the region in the 1970s and 1980s was also prototypical of the post Cold War international order and the redirection of U.S. national-security priorities toward the Middle East. Anwar Sadat's infitāḥ was indicative of a worldwide shift toward open investment in the economies of the developing world. Meanwhile, the fragmentation of the state in Lebanon can be read as a precursor to the “failed state” phenomenon that would become a major foreign policy concern following the end of the Cold War. The Iranian Revolution and the breakdown of the state in Afghanistan signaled, among other things, the obsolescence of the Cold War ideological struggles that had seemed to dominate international politics in the post-1945 period. Likewise, the Iran–Iraq War suggested the likelihood of resurgent regional conflicts in the Global South as the U.S.–Soviet rivalry began to wind down. At the same time, Jimmy Carter's creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force—the precursor to U.S. Central Command—and the advent of the massive Bright Star war games were symbolic of a major shift in U.S. strategic attention away from the potential Cold War battlefields of central Europe and toward 21st-century security interests in the Third World.

As they have worked to incorporate the view from Cairo alongside the view from Washington, international historians have borrowed heavily from area studies, crossing disciplines and subfields in an effort to broaden their scholarly horizons. By adopting a global analytical framework, the new Cold War international history has opened new lines of inquiry into the superpower conflict and worked to dismantle conceptions that the MENA region must be treated as fundamentally unique. Rather, by placing events in the region within their broader international context, the new generation of Cold War scholars has endeavored to gain a better understanding of the global currents of historical change in the modern world.