by Benjamin V. Allison
(Map by Ian Macky. Public domain.)
In November 1980, the Arab League met in Amman, Jordan, for a summit aimed at promoting Arab unity, particularly against Israel and Egypt, which had concluded a peace treaty the previous year. But the summit rapidly fell apart, as members of the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front (جبهة الصمود والتّصدي) — Syria, Algeria, Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) — boycotted the meeting, and Syria and Jordan mobilized thousands of troops to their shared border. Although hostilities were avoided, the incident signaled deepening fissures in the Arab world, which was now split into two major camps: the so-called moderates — Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq — which supported Iraq’s war against Iran, and the purportedly “radical” Steadfastness Front backing Iran and boycotting the summit.
Just two years earlier, the Arabs had come together in Baghdad, Iraq, for a summit where they presented a united front against the Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement. Now the Steadfastness Front, originally formed in 1977 as a bulwark against Egypt’s defection from the Arab fold, seemingly worked against Arab unity, aligning itself with both Iran and the Soviet Union; in fact, in early 1980, the Front’s members were the only Arab states to vote against the United Nations resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Sudan also voted agains the resolution, but later claimed it was unintentional [Dishon and Maddy-Weitzman 1981: 180].)
What led to this division within the Arab world? How did the Front relate to the Soviet Union and the United States? How did these “radical” Arabs impact regional and Cold War dynamics? My dissertation project seeks to answer these questions. To my knowledge, the Front’s importance has not received sustained scholarly attention, and it certainly has not been explored using archival sources. I argue that relations between the United States, Soviet Union, and Arab “radicals” — including the Steadfastness Front and, until about 1979, Iraq — played a significant role in the decline of superpower détente and reshaped the Greater Middle East. It highlights the agency of small, relatively weak state and nonstate actors in the Global Cold War, illustrating their ability to shape events in their favor (Smith 2000). It does so by examining the Front’s internal dynamics, its members’ behavior in Arab and world politics both publicly (e.g., at the United Nations, Arab League summits, and Non-Aligned Movement conferences) and privately, and its influence on and response to major historical processes including the Lebanese Civil War, Iranian Revolution, Ogaden War, Egyptian-Israeli peace process, and Soviet-Afghan War. Ultimately, I argue that while the Front failed to block the Egyptian-Israeli peace process, it succeeded in preventing the peace process from expanding further.
I will tell this complex story drawing on sources in English, Arabic, Bulgarian, and Russian. My research will take me to various archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Bulgaria, including several repositories with Arabic-language collections, such as the Ba’th Party Records at the Hoover Institution. In addition to archival research, I will also draw on memoirs, journalistic accounts, speeches, and interviews to fill in the gaps left by spotty documentary records and limited archival access in the Arab world. In my time at the American Center of Research as the Pierre and Patricia Bikai Fellow, I worked to translate portions of memoirs by important Arab leaders, including Mudar Badran, George Habash, and Abdessalam Jelloud.
References
Dishon, Daniel and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman. 1981. “Inter-Arab Relations.” In Middle East Contemporary Survey, vol. IV: 1979–80, edited by Colin Legum, Haim Shaked, and Daniel Dishon, 180. New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers.
Smith, Tony. 2000. “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War.” Diplomatic History 24 (4): 567–591.
Benjamin V. Allison is a PhD student in history and a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the history of U.S. foreign and national security policy, especially toward the Middle East and Russia. His work has been published in Perspectives on Terrorism and by the International Centre for Counter-terrorism. As for his public-facing work, he has bylines at Time, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Not Even Past, Inkstick, RealClearHistory, the Wilson Center, and the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College.