Italy and the Middle East

Geopolitics, Dialogue and Power during the Cold War

Paolo Soave, Luciano Monzali, Paolo Soave, Luciano Monzali

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838606954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Italy played a vital role in the Cold War dynamics that shaped the Middle East in the latter part of the 20th century. It was a junior partner in the strategic plans of NATO and warmly appreciated by some Arab countries for its regional approach. But Italian foreign policy towards the Middle East balanced between promoting dialogue, stability and cooperation on one hand, and colluding with global superpower manoeuvres to exploit existing tensions and achieve local influence on the other. Italy and the Middle East brings together a range of experts on Italian international relations to analyse, for the first time in English, the country's Cold War relationship with the Middle East. Chapters covering a wide range of defining twentieth century events - from the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Lebanese Civil War, to the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – demonstrate the nuances of Italian foreign policy in dealing with the complexity of Middle Eastern relations. The collection demonstrates the interaction of local and global issues in shaping Italy's international relations with the Middle East, making it essential reading to students of the Cold War, regional interactions, and the international relations of Italy and the Middle East.

Part One

The Middle East in a period of change

1

Footholds in the sand – the Middle East and the Cold War, 1973–93: An introductory chapter and review

Joseph A. Bongiorno

Introduction

During the 1956 American presidential campaign, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, criticized American foreign policy towards the Middle East under the incumbent presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Reacting to the latter’s foreign policy decisions at the height of both the Suez Crisis in the Middle East and the presidential campaign, Stevenson declared that administration foreign policy officials

have given the Soviet Union two great victories – a foothold in the Middle East and the breakdown of the Western Alliance; the Soviets’ ‘supreme objective’ since World War II. … As a result, the United States found itself arrayed in the United Nations with Soviet Russia and the dictator of Egypt against the democracies of Britain, France and Israel. ‘A foreign policy which has brought about these results … is a foreign policy which has failed’.¹

The statement and events that surrounded it are representative of the Cold War and its impact on the Middle East during the post-war years. Decades marked by a multitude of attempts to establish footholds by various powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union left imprints in a region marred by contesting ideologies, competing national interests and violence. Like all footprints in the sand, they slowly disappeared with the passage of time only to be replaced with new ones.

The general understanding of the origins and reasons for the Cold War differs among various historians. For some, the Cold War was perhaps about an exaggerated ideological struggle over the incompatibility of communism with American ideals.² Others saw it as a natural consequence of geopolitical expansions of two nation states with specific national interests and the quest for geopolitical/strategic parity over a period of time.³ Others still see it as a confrontation that had its origins as the result of the First World War and the burgeoning Soviet state as an unwanted member of the post-war international community.⁴ Whatever its origins, the Cold War left no continent of the world unaffected or immune. A series of networks of alliances or treaty arrangements developed between 1945 and 1991 that in one way or another were linked to either the United States or the Soviet Union. Hence, as in many other regions of the world, the Middle East and its post-Second World War creation of independent nation states became part of those various networks, leaving the infamous footprints created by the consequences of the Cold War and its rival superpowers.

The geopolitical importance of the Middle East cannot be underestimated. Contiguous to many major oceans and straits and including the Suez Canal, the Middle East is a lynchpin in terms of mastery of the seas and East–West trade routes. Combined with such trade is the necessity of naval control, essential to former powers such as the Persian, Roman and British empires. This still serves as an essential subject of the lessons regarding sea power and survival of the nation state.⁵ Likewise, the land mass stretching from north-eastern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and Afghanistan is vital for international commerce, military movement and access to important natural resources such as petroleum, river systems and water. In addition, the region’s demography would also play a role for the world’s superpowers in the Cold War struggle. Thus, the internal conditions of the various Middle Eastern nation states and their respective diasporas would have an impact on the formulation of foreign and national security policies for the United States, the Soviet Union and their respective allies.⁶

Hence, it is understandable that the Middle East would play a pivotal role in Cold War politics. During the time frame and scope of this book, the Middle East was an essential part of the calculation of a geopolitical strategy for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Simultaneously, the Cold War had an impact upon the positions and foreign policy strategies of the Middle East nation states, taking into account what role the superpowers could play in regard to the advancement of their own national interests. Since the end of the Second World War, issues such as the founding of the State of Israel, the question of Palestine and the continued evolution of the Arab states and Iran have been catalysts in both the former Cold War as well as the emerging ‘new’ Cold War in the contemporary Middle East.⁷ The interrelationship between the historic Cold War and the Middle East region in terms of the search for peace was probably best summed up by Henry Kissinger in a speech delivered at the opening of one of the many peace conferences, held in Geneva in 1973:

In all efforts for peace the overriding problem is to relate the sense of individual justice to the common good. The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong but when two rights face each other.

The problems of the Middle East today have such a character. There is justice on all sides, but there is a greater justice still in finding a truth which merges all aspirations in the realization of a common humanity. It was a Jewish sage who, speaking for all mankind, expressed this problem well: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me, but if I am for myself alone, who am I?’⁸

The United States, the Cold War and the Middle East

The American relationship with the Middle East region is a long and complicated one, going as far back as the presidency of Thomas Jefferson and the issues regarding the Barbary and Tripoli wars.⁹ During the Second World War era, America’s evolving relationship with the emerging Arab states¹⁰ and the founding of the State of Israel¹¹ deepened its involvement in the region. For obvious geopolitical reasons, the Cold War period forced the United States into creating its own footholds spanning from the shores of the eastern Mediterranean to Iran. During both the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies, separate American ‘doctrines’ or foreign policy exhortations were made regarding the eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions in response to the Greek civil war and the Lebanon Crisis of 1958 in relationship to the containment policy.¹² Thus, the American experience serves to throw a spotlight on the history of the period under examination.

The American relationship with the Middle East, notwithstanding the perceived necessity of containment, was (and still is) marred with frustration with several persistent and aggravating problems. Foremost, of course, is the continued search for Middle East peace and a solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict over the geographical territory of Palestine. Second is the accommodation of the various Arab states and their own particular national interests beyond the parameters of the Arab–Israeli conflict and within the framework of the containment policy. Third is the continued political and military access to the region and its natural resources. Fourth is the maintenance of an alliance system within the containment policy framework, known formerly as the Baghdad Pact or Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), which would prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle Eastern region. CENTO was understood as a logical extension of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), stretching across the Middle East region from Turkey to Pakistan, exclusive of Israel. However, unlike NATO, there is no unified command. CENTO is also hampered by changing internal political circumstances and conditions as well as exterior issues such as the various Indo-Pakistani wars. The alliance, by the 1970s, had become a formality. With the Islamic republican revolution in Iran in 1979, CENTO was formally disbanded.¹³

The historical period from the 1970s to 1990s has been a continuation of the American experience in the Middle East region since the Second World War. These experiences were intertwined with various political challenges within the containment policy. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was confronted with the opposing interests of the Egyptian government under President Gamal Abdel Nasser. While trying to foster more stable relationships with the various Arab states contiguous to Israel, the United States ensured the protection of Israeli interests with bilateral arrangements that were adverse to those same Arab states. Simultaneously, the United States attempted to extract concessions from Israel to achieve a framework for peace as well as diplomatic recognition for the latter by its immediate neighbours.

All of this required a delicate balancing act on the part of successive American administrations and their foreign policy advisors. The Arab–Israeli wars of 1956¹⁴ and 1967 demonstrated the difficulty of maintaining such a policy, at times forsaking traditional relationships with American allies in order to prevent or limit the ability of the Soviet Union from penetrating into or meddling in the region. The administration of John F. Kennedy suffered several setbacks in its Middle Eastern policies, for example, in attempting to be ‘even-handed’ to accommodate both Israeli and Arab interests, only to remain ‘empty-handed’ at the end.¹⁵ The Johnson administration had similar experiences, complicated further by the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 and the threat of superpower military confrontation in the area.¹⁶ The Arab–Israeli War of 1973 was a reminder of the spectre of a possible confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union fostered by irreconcilable differences among the Israelis and Arabs. Despite United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973),¹⁷ no solution seemed in sight for the settlement of the major issues, much less Israeli withdrawal to the de facto pre-1967 borders. During the Nixon and Ford administrati...