ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the region’s ‘place in the world’, focusing on regional tensions created at independence, the role of foreign-power intervention, the significance of oil politics and the regional strategic balance. Often the desires of external powers, in particular the United States and the Soviet Union who each attempted to exert control over the region during the Cold War, conflicted with those of local leaders who sought to navigate an independent path in their search for a post-colonial identity. Religious revolution in Iran, the growing significance of oil resources, and the end of the Soviet Union created a radically different regional strategic balance, which resulted in an expanded role for the US, as hegemonic power, in the region. The heightened level of American involvement in the Middle East has been marked by two wars with Iraq within a fifteen-year period (Map 6.1).
