Arab Cold War

The Arab Cold War (Arabic: الحرب العربية الباردة al-ḥarb al-`arabiyyah al-bāridah) was a political rivalry in the Arab world from the early 1950s to the late 1970s or early 1990s and a part of the wider Cold War. It is generally accepted that the beginning of the Arab Cold War is marked by the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which led to Gamal Abdel Nasser becoming the president of Egypt in 1956. Thereafter, newly formed Arab republics, inspired by revolutionary secular nationalism and Nasser's Egypt, engaged in political rivalries with conservative traditionalist Arab monarchies, influenced by Saudi Arabia. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the ascension of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as leader of Iran, is widely seen as the end of this period of internal conflicts and rivalry. A new era of Arab-Iranian tensions followed, overshadowing the bitterness of intra-Arab strife.

Nasser espoused secular pan-Arab nationalism and socialism as a response to the perceived complicity of the Arab monarchies in Western interference in the Arab world. He also opposed the monarchies' support of rentierism and Islamism. Later Nasser embraced the Palestinian cause, albeit within the framework of pan-Arabism. After Egypt's political victory in the 1956 Suez Crisis, known in the Arab world as the Tripartite Aggression, Nasser and his associated ideology quickly gained support in other Arab countries, from Iraq in the east to French-occupied Algeria in the west. In several Arab countries, such as Iraq, North Yemen and Libya, conservative regimes were overthrown and replaced by new, ‘revolutionary’ republican governments. Meanwhile, Arab countries under Western countries’ rule, such as Algeria and South Yemen, experienced nationalist uprisings aimed at independence. At the same time, Syria, which was already strongly Arab nationalist, formed a short-lived federal union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic. Several other attempts were made to unite the Arab states in various configurations, but all attempts were unsuccessful.

Following their independence, the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco, as well as the Gulf states, formed an alliance to directly or indirectly counter Egyptian influence. Saudi Arabia and Jordan, previously rivals over the competing claims of their respective dynasties, worked closely together to support the royalist faction in the North Yemen Civil War. The conflict became a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia following the establishment of the Nasserist Yemen Arab Republic in 1962.

The Arab Cold War was linked to the global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, as the United States supported the conservative monarchies led by Saudi Arabia, while the Soviet Union supported the Egyptian-led republics, after Nasser's split with the United States and pivot to alignment with the Soviet Union. This was despite the republics' suppression of internal Arab communist movements. The Arab revolutionary nationalist republican movement supported anti-American, anti-Western, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial revolutionary movements outside the Arab world, such as the Cuban Revolution. In contrast, the Arab monarchist movement supported conservative governments in predominantly Muslim countries such as Pakistan.

The earliest date marked as the end of the Arab Cold Wars is 1970. The success of the State of Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 undermined the strategic strength of both Egypt and Nasser. The resolution of the North Yemen Civil War, although brokered by Nasser and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, was a victory for the Egyptian-backed Yemeni Republicans. The intense Egyptian-Saudi rivalry faded dramatically as attention focused on Egypt's efforts to liberate its own territory under Israeli occupation.

After Nasser's death in 1970, Anwar Sadat became president and departed significantly from Nasser's revolutionary platform, both domestically and in regional and international affairs. In particular, Sadat sought to establish a close strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia under King Faisal, which was crucial to Egypt's success in the first part of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Building on these early successes, Sadat completely distanced himself from Nasserism by ending Egypt's strategic alliance with the Soviet Union and aligning himself instead with the United States. In 1978, he negotiated a peace treaty with the state of Israel that required the removal of all Israeli military personnel and settlers from Egyptian land. Sadat's peace treaty not only alienated Nasserists and other secular Arab nationalists, but also enraged Islamists, who denounced him as an apostate. This eventually led to his assassination by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League, leading to its virtual isolation in the region. Meanwhile, Islamism grew in popularity, culminating in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This established Shi'a Iran as a regional power committed to overthrowing the predominantly Sunni governments of Arab states, both republican and monarchical. After the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War in the early 1980s, Egypt, still suspended from the Arab League, joined Saudi Arabia in supporting Sunni-led Iraq against Shi'ite Iran. At the same time, the Sunni–Shi'a conflict in other parts of the region, such as Lebanon, became a new proxy conflict between the regional powers of the two Muslim sects.