Superpower conflict on the Middle East was remarkably different from other global Cold War issues. Although the Cold War is traditionally seen as an ideological conflict, the role of ideology in the Middle East was usurped by other factors (notably economic and nationalistic), thus superpower intervention was motivated more by "anti-Soviet" and "anti-West" (as opposed to "anti-Communist" and "anti-Capitalist") sentiment. In general, the roles of the US and the U.S.S.R in the Middle East can be summarized under two broad categories: military and minatory support. In assessing these roles, it can be considered how each superpower contributed to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Military support was one of the most inflammatory roles of the two superpowers in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Throughout the conflict, there was a tendency for the superpowers to court alliances through offers to weaponry, both as a means of providing security for clients and of manipulating the regionally balance of power. It is not unreasonable to say that without the superpowers' policies of the transferring military resources to their Middle Eastern allies, the entire Arab-Israeli conflict may never have reached the scale it did over the course of 1948-79.
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