Day: August 10, 2016

International Relations Between Two World Wars: Part II Mussolini’s foreign policy In the early days of Mussolini’s regime (he came to power in 1922), Italian foreign policy seemed rather confused: Mussolini knew what he wanted, which was ‘to make Italy great, respected and feared’, but he was not sure how to achieve this, apart from […]

International Relations Between Two World Wars: Part I International relations between the two world wars fall into two distinct phases, with the division at January 1933, the fateful month in which Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Before that, there seemed reasonable hope that world peace could be maintained, in spite of the failure […]

THE GULF WAR, 1990-1 Even before he had accepted the peace terms at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein began his next act of aggression. His forces invaded and quickly occupied the small neighbouring state of Kuwait (August 1990). (a) Saddam Hussein’s motives His real motive was probably to get his hands on […]

THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR, 1980-8 The Middle East and the Arab world were thrown into fresh confusion in September 1980 when Iraqi troops invaded Iran. (a) Iraq’s motives President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had several motives for launching the attack. He was afraid of militant Islam spreading across the border into Iraq from Iran. Iran had […]

CONFLICT IN THE LEBANON Originally part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, Lebanon was made a French mandate at the end of the First World War and became fully independent in 1945. It soon became a prosperous state, making money from banking and from serving as an important outlet for the exports of Syria, Jordan and Iraq. However, in […]

THE CREATION OF ISRAEL AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR, 1948-9 (a) Why did the creation of the state of Israel lead to war? The origin of the problem went back almost 2000 years to the year AD 71, when most of the Jews were driven out of Palestine, which was then their homeland, by the Romans. In fact, […]

The Middle East has been one of the world’s most troubled regions, especially since 1945. Wars and civil wars have raged almost non-stop. The Middle East consists of Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Turkey, the Yemen republics, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Most of these states, except Turkey and Iran, are peopled by […]