ABSTRACT
The fortuitous coincidence of the Gulf War of 1990/1, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War provided a catalyst for a process which I think is best described as a ‘remaking’ of the Middle East’s structures of government and of the pattern of relationships between individual states and with the outside world. Iraq’s invasion of a sovereign Arab state in the name of its own version of Arabism, and then the deep divisions which this produced both between regimes and inside each society, provided a near fatal blow to what was left of the once powerful belief in a unity which could transcend individual local interest. It also left a legacy of considerable mistrust, manifest, for example, in the temporary isolation of regimes like the Jordanian, the Yemeni and Sudanese whose leaders had been unwilling to condemn the Iraqi position outright. It encouraged the Gulf states to replace their emphasis on collective security arrangements within the GCC by bilateral defence agreements with the United States, Britain and France. And it opened the way for direct American involvement in the promotion of an Israeli/Palestinian peace process leading from the Madrid Conference of 1991, to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and then the establishment of a Palestinian National Authority (PNA – later shortened to PA) in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank in 1994.
