This paper considers the impact of Nasser's ambitions for regional hegemony on the Trucial States and the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. In the latter half of the 1950s and into the 1960s revolutionary activities in the Trucial States remained limited to isolated youth groups and expatriate teachers largely from Egypt, Palestine and Jordan. The expansion of the "Arab Cold War" from a rivalry between Egypt, Iraq and Syria into a war in the Yemens brought into focus the antagonism between republican and monarchical regimes. This fueled fears of Trucial rulers and British officials that the Arab states of the Persian Gulf would be destabilized. The British decision to withdraw from the Persian Gulf in 1968 was rooted in the ailing British economy, but as this paper will demonstrate, concerns about the spread of pan-Arab nationalism drove negotiations between Gulf rulers and British Foreign Office officials over the form the future United Arab Emirates would take and its governing institutions. British documents reveal that the Foreign Office hoped a visible withdrawal of military power from the Persian Gulf would serve to silence anti-imperialist and pan-Arab criticisms of Gulf rulers. Local rulers argued, though, that British advisors and institutions would also need to become subordinate to Arab and Gulf advisors in order to effectively prevent Arab nationalists from targeting the sheikhdoms. The reach of Nasser's pan-Arab ideologies thus reached beyond his rivalry with nearby Arab states to impact the process of state formation in the Arab Gulf.

This paper examines the roots of Egyptian-Iraqi rivalry in the context of the Second World War. This rivalry was one of the hallmarks of the post-war "Arab Cold War" as described in Malcolm Kerr's seminal work and it was most evident in the field of Arab unity. While most of the literature on the subject emphasizes the regional and anti-imperial considerations behind Egyptian-Iraqi competition for leadership of the Arab world, this paper focuses on the domestic and international pressures that drove this rivalry, with World War II serving as the catalyst. Both Mustafa al-Nahhas and Nuri al-Said, Prime Ministers of Egypt and Iraq respectively, found their nationalist credentials called into question due to their wartime cooperation with the British. Each hoped that claiming leadership of the larger Arab nationalist movement would provide a way for them to restore their prestige at home and deflect criticism of the domestic political situation. By the end of the war, the Arab unity movement took on new significance. Proponents of Arab unity viewed it as a way to ensure that the voice of the Arab states would be heard in post-war peace talks. By acting together, they might better represent their interests in light of the growing movement for the formation of regional and international organizations. Arab unity was not just a means of responding to the pressures of the western imperial powers, but also preparing for the emerging post-war reality of a world divided into American and Soviet spheres of influence, in which small states would be increasingly vulnerable. This paper explores the historical genesis of the "Arab Cold War" in both senses of the phrase by focusing on inter-Arab rivalries during the later war years as well as the role that Arab unity played in debates over the place of the Arab states in the emerging Cold War conflict. It examines the mechanics of Arab unity as conveyed in the proceedings of the meetings of Arab leaders held in 1944-1945 and the ways in which these ideas were presented to the wider public through the Egyptian and Iraqi Arabic mass media. It contributes to our understanding of the roots of the Egyptian-Iraqi rivalry for leadership of the Arab world not only in a regional and anti-colonial context, but also in a larger international one.

In the preface to the 3rd edition of his book The Arab Cold War Malcolm Kerr explicitly argued against the idea that Arab politics from 1958-1970 were simply a projection of decisions made in foreign capitals such as Washington, London, Moscow and Jerusalem, emphasizing instead the strong roles of political ambition, tactical convenience and realism among Arab statesmen. I would argue that, in the particular case of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Kerr was right about importance of ambition, convenience and realism in Arab politics, but wrong when he argued that regional dynamics were more important than foreign influence. Rather, smaller Arab nations needed to position themselves between Cold Wars. In the case of Jordan, its relatively weak position in the Arab world (particularly its lack of financial independence) resulted in a necessary attention to what happened in foreign capitals. Dependent on foreign aid for its very existence, Jordan walked a tightrope between Western patrons and Arab peers. This study focuses specifically on the period of the Kennedy Administration (1961-1963). During this period the Hashemite Kingdom struggled to maintain internal cohesion while caught in the crosshairs of royalist-revolutionary tensions in the region. Compounding this already tenuous situation, Jordan found itself dependent on foreign aid from Western governments increasingly interested in distancing themselves from royalists in order to court Nasser. These various tensions came together around the Yemeni Coup of 1962, when US recognition of the revolutionary regime in Sanaa, prompted the Hashemite Kingdom to transition from a government dependent on a "special relationship" with a Western power, to a more diverse player in both the Arab and global Cold Wars. This case study uses a blend of declassified US and British documents and secondary monographs to explore Jordanian responses to the changing currents of international relations, and the effects that these had on both Jordan's foreign and domestic politics, with special attention to the focus of King Hussein on maintaining the preeminence of the Hashemite family in Jordan. It will argue that Hussein and his government exhibited exactly the ambition and realism for which Kerr argued, but did so on a global scale, taking advantage of Cold War politics and regional rivalries to redefine Jordan's political opportunities and international role.