The Middle East and the End of the Cold War

Abstract

To an extent that is only now becoming clear, the Cold War dominated political events for more than forty years, not only at the international but also at the national level. The Cold War was first of all a product of a bipolar international distribution of power. It was a struggle between the two states with the largest military capabilities. For a time, into the 1960s, the Soviet Union was also the most important economic rival for the United States, at least in terms of aggregate economic output. The intensity of the Cold War was exacerbated by the conflicting ideologies of its two major protagonists. The legitimating myth of the Soviet Union, Marxism Leninism, was antithetical to that of the United States, Lockean liberalism. The United States and the Soviet Union were rivals not only because they were the poles in a bipolar world but also because their governing ideologies were so fundamentally at odds.