IB History External Threats Notes

External Threats: The Cold War and the Road to Defeat

Egypt Between Two Blocs

1. The world the Free Officers inherited in 1952 was a world already divided by the Cold War into two rival, heavily armed camps.
2. The Western Bloc, led by the United States and including Britain and France, faced the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union and including China and their respective allies.
3. Each superpower bloc worked actively to maintain and expand its network of allied states, and neither welcomed a client state's move toward the other side.
4. Egypt had traditionally sat within the Western Bloc's sphere of influence, shaped by decades of British occupation and continued British military presence in the Canal Zone.
5. Any Egyptian movement away from this Western alignment was viewed with considerable hostility both in London and in Washington.
6. Nasser's own foreign policy therefore had to be conducted within, and often against, this rigid Cold War framework rather than in genuine isolation from it.
7. Understanding this superpower backdrop is essential to explaining nearly every major external pressure Nasser's regime faced between 1952 and his death in 1970.
8. This tension between bloc politics and genuine national interest recurs throughout every episode examined in this article.

Bandung and the Search for a Third Way

1. In April 1955, a conference of newly independent and non-aligned nations was held in Bandung, Indonesia, seeking to establish a genuine third path between the two Cold War blocs.
2. Nasser's presence at Bandung marked a clear step away from Egypt's traditional alignment with Britain and toward a more independent, assertively non-aligned foreign policy.
3. The Western Bloc viewed Nasser's participation with considerable displeasure, seeing it as a worrying signal of Egypt's growing willingness to act outside Western direction.
4. Bandung connected Nasser directly to other prominent non-aligned leaders, including India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Indonesia's Sukarno, strengthening his international profile beyond the Arab world.
5. This early experiment in non-alignment did not remove Egypt from Cold War pressures entirely, but it established the diplomatic pattern Nasser would return to repeatedly over the following fifteen years.
6. Bandung showed both superpowers that Egypt's foreign policy could not simply be assumed or taken for granted by either side.

The Czechoslovak Arms Deal, 1955

1. Although Nasser's rhetoric increasingly emphasised social justice and criticised capitalism, his own brand of socialism was never actually modelled directly on the Soviet system.
2. His regime repeatedly clashed with Egyptian trade unionists and kept its prisons regularly filled with domestic communists, whom Nasser accused of serving foreign rather than Egyptian or Arab interests.
3. Despite this domestic hostility to communism, Egypt faced a severe arms embargo that had been in place against all combatants since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
4. With Western states unwilling to supply Egypt with modern weapons, Nasser turned to Czechoslovakia, a member of the Soviet-aligned Eastern Bloc, for military supplies.
5. The resulting arms agreement, signed in August 1955, provided Egypt with weapons no Western state had been willing to offer.
6. Although framed by Nasser as a purely practical, non-ideological purchase, the deal inevitably signalled a real shift of Egyptian alignment toward the Eastern Bloc in Western eyes.
7. This apparent contradiction, harsh treatment of domestic communists alongside a major arms deal with a communist state, illustrates the pragmatic rather than ideological character of Nasser's Cold War diplomacy.
8. The Czechoslovak arms deal marked the first major concrete instance of Egypt accepting significant Eastern Bloc support, setting a precedent for the larger Soviet relationship that followed.

The Aswan Dam and the Turn to the Soviet Union

1. After the United States and the World Bank withdrew their offer to finance the Aswan High Dam in 1956, Nasser needed an alternative source of major international funding.
2. He turned to the Soviet Union, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed in 1958 to provide the substantial loan Egypt required.
3. Khrushchev's willingness to fund the project reflected the Soviet Union's own strategic interest in extending its influence into the Middle East and Mediterranean, a region previously dominated by Western powers.
4. In October 1958, the Soviet Union expanded its commitment further, agreeing to provide direct technical assistance alongside the financial loan.
5. Construction on the Aswan High Dam itself began in January 1960, backed almost entirely by Soviet rather than Western resources.
6. Khrushchev personally attended the inauguration of the dam's first completed phase in May 1964, a highly visible demonstration of the new Soviet-Egyptian relationship.
7. This deepening relationship caused considerable alarm in Washington, and Nasser was increasingly portrayed in Western media as an ideological enemy aligned firmly with the communist bloc.
8. The relationship also had wider regional consequences, dividing opinion among Arab states and further solidifying Western countries' reliance on Israel as their most dependable regional ally.

The War Over Water, 1964

1. In January 1964, the League of Arab States held a summit meeting in Cairo, with the re-routing of the Jordan River high on its agenda.
2. Under the armistice arrangements following the 1948 war, Israel, Jordan, and Syria were required to share the waters of the Jordan and Yarmuk rivers.
3. A 1955 plan to formally allocate water quotas between these states had been rejected outright by the Arab League nations at the time it was proposed.
4. Israel proceeded independently, and the completion of its National Water Carrier project in 1964 allowed it to begin drawing water directly from the Sea of Galilee.
5. The January 1964 Cairo summit treated this Israeli action as a direct threat and issued a public statement warning of collective Arab military preparations in response.
6. Arab leaders also agreed a plan to re-route regional water sources away from Israel, aiming to cut Israel's available water supply by roughly 35 percent.
7. Beyond periodic clashes along the Syrian-Israeli border, this water dispute never escalated into direct large-scale conflict, but it left underlying regional tensions unresolved heading into 1967.
8. Egyptian diplomats used the water dispute to reinforce Nasser's broader claim to Arab leadership, presenting Egypt as the convening power capable of coordinating a unified Arab response.
9. The unresolved nature of the water dispute meant it remained one among several overlapping sources of Egyptian-Israeli tension feeding into the crisis of 1967.

The Six-Day War, June 1967

1. The Six-Day War, also known as the Third Arab-Israeli War, began with a pre-emptive Israeli air strike against Egypt on 5 June 1967.
2. Historian Steven Cook identifies two specific factors that pushed Nasser to escalate tensions in the months immediately before the war.
3. Between April and May 1967, clashes along the Syrian-Israeli border intensified sharply, including an April incident in which Israeli aircraft shot down six Syrian fighter jets.
4. In May, Nasser received a Soviet intelligence report suggesting Israeli forces were massing toward the Syrian border, adding further pressure on him to respond as the Arab world's acknowledged leader.
5. Arab leaders hostile to Nasser had also begun accusing him of hiding behind the United Nations Emergency Force stationed in Sinai rather than confronting Israel directly.
6. Facing this dilemma, and with Egypt's army still heavily committed to the ongoing North Yemen Civil War described elsewhere in this unit, Nasser chose escalation rather than restraint.
7. Egypt formally requested the withdrawal of UNEF from Sinai, and Nasser then announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran, a key sea passage Israel had explicitly identified in 1956 as a red line justifying war.
8. Israel launched its pre-emptive strike on 5 June 1967, destroying much of Egypt's air force on the ground within the war's opening hours.
9. The military defeat that followed was catastrophic: around 300 aircraft, 900 tanks, 500 artillery pieces, and 10,000 vehicles were destroyed or captured, alongside between 10,000 and 15,000 Egyptian soldiers killed and around 500 captured.
10. Approximately 250,000 Egyptians were displaced by the fighting, and a ceasefire was finally declared on 9 June 1967, just four days after the war began.
11. Egyptian pilots and ground crews had received extensive Soviet training and equipment in the years before 1967, making the speed and completeness of the air force's destruction on the ground especially striking to outside observers.
12. Historians continue to debate how much of Egypt's defeat resulted from Israeli tactical superiority versus deeper structural weaknesses in Egyptian military planning, some of which connect directly to the Yemen war's drain on resources described elsewhere in this unit.

The Aftermath: Resignation, Purges, and Renewed Conflict

1. On 9 June 1967, a visibly shaken Nasser appeared on Egyptian television, accepted personal responsibility for what he called al-naqsah, the setback, and announced his resignation.
2. Millions of Egyptians poured onto the streets in spontaneous protest, and Nasser withdrew his resignation the same day, promising to remain in office until Egypt could rid itself of what he called enemy aggression.
3. In the months that followed, the regime purged a significant number of senior army and air force officers held responsible for the scale of the defeat.
4. Commander-in-Chief Abdel Hakim Amer, accused of conspiring against Nasser during this purge, died by suicide in his prison cell in August 1967.
5. Nasser used the crisis to re-evaluate several of his own policies, toning down his socialist rhetoric and reducing the Arab Socialist Union's direct interference in daily economic management, described further elsewhere in this unit.
6. He also adopted a noticeably more conciliatory approach toward other Arab states, presenting himself increasingly as a regional mediator rather than as a rival for Arab leadership.
7. Toward Israel, however, Nasser's stance remained essentially unchanged, and in March 1969 he launched the War of Attrition, a sustained campaign of attacks against Israeli forces in Sinai.
8. This ongoing conflict produced bloody retaliatory strikes from Israel but also drew growing superpower attention and involvement in the region throughout the following years.
9. Egypt's relationship with the Soviet Union deepened further after 1967, as Moscow moved quickly to resupply and rebuild the Egyptian military following its catastrophic losses.
10. This growing Soviet military presence inside Egypt, including thousands of Soviet advisers, became itself a significant feature of the country's final years under Nasser's leadership.

Nasser's Death and the End of an Era, September 1970

1. Nasser's final major act in office reflected the same commitment to Arab unity that had defined so much of his foreign policy throughout his rule.
2. In September 1970, an emergency Arab Summit was convened in Cairo to address the escalating Jordanian-Palestinian crisis known as Black September.
3. Nasser personally succeeded in bringing King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, together for direct talks at the summit.
4. The summit concluded its work on 28 September 1970, only hours before Nasser died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 52.
5. His death marked the end of an eighteen-year period that had reshaped Egypt's domestic politics and its regional standing more dramatically than any other in the country's modern history.

Historiographical Debate: Skilled Pragmatist or Reactive Leader?