ABSTRACT
The Iranian revolution disrupted the “other” arena in the Middle East—the Persian Gulf—but it had reverberations throughout the region. The friction generated by opposition movements of one form or another from Central and Latin America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia produced explosive conditions in many states. Apart from steering the Middle East in a new direction, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty might be seen a hundred years from as eliciting little but a brief respite in a continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. One clearly observable repercussion of the events of 1979 is that the center of gravity in the Middle East has steadily moved eastward toward the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan may have resulted from the unfulfilled promise of détente with the United States. The cold war had apparently become too institutionalized to be cast aside by a few summit meetings, hugs between leaders, economic deals, and arms limitation talks.
