The bulk of this long article, published in a London magazine and aimed at the British public, discusses international relations in the Far East, and in particular the Russian advance into the Chinese seas. The Middle East only receives cursory attention, with the exception of the Persian Gulf which Mahan describes as a geopolitical flashpoint. The American admiral defines the Middle East as a zone with fluid borders situated between South and West Asia and centered around the Gulf. More specifically, for Mahan it was a region where Britain’s dominance of the strategic land and sea communication routes between London and India was increasingly being threatened by the encroachments of imperial rivals.

Chirol introduces his definition of the Middle East by citing a speech given by the viceroy of India Curzon a few months before his Gulf tour as well as the work of Alfred T. Mahan.

Shimon Stein is a former Israeli diplomat. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS. 

It was following the Six-Day War of 1967 that Arab Americans began to seriously discuss, and be politically active in, questions regarding the Arab World and US government policy and US public mindsets towards it, as Salim Yacub’s Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s (2016) has argued.

This is an essay written in 1967/68 by the literary scholar and then slowly emerging public intellectual Edward Said (1935-2003). It was originally published in a special issue of the US journal The Arab World, which was republished as an edited volume titled The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of 1967: An Arab Perspective. Beginning with an incident at Princeton University in summer 1967, Said analyzes US views of Arabs—situating them vis-à-vis European views somewhat differently than he later would in his 1978 classic Orientalism—and ends by invoking (Western) “imperialism” and “the Arab’s … right to reoccupy his place in history and in actuality,” a theme he would develop in his masterly Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)

After World War I, several communist movements tried to replicate the Bolsheviks’ take-over of Russia in European countries, most importantly and most often in Germany. All failed. As a result, the Soviet leadership and communists worldwide from around 1920 focused more energies on colonized countries, especially in Asia. As most of these seemed to lack the economic and sociopolitical conditions necessary for a communist revolution, the aim was to weaken if not overthrow European imperial rule, serving the interests of both the USSR and the local petit bourgeoisie, peasants, and few industrial workers. The perhaps greatest price was China. Moreover, India was seen to be (exceptionally) ripe for direct communist action.

Communists and some anti-colonial nationalists were also active in and across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, often sharing resources while being networked with the Communist International. Abbreviated as the Comintern (also the Third International), the latter was the key international communist organization: founded in 1919 in Moscow, headquartered there, and employing through its dissolution in 1943 thousands of professional cadres from around the world, principally from Europe and Asia, as Brigitte Studer’s Reisende der Weltrevolution: Eine Globalgeschichte der Kommunistischen Internationale (2020) shows. Also in the Soviet Union, the year 1920 saw the landmark Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku. And in 1921, the Communist University for Laborers of the East (Kommunistichyeskii univyersityet trudyaschikhsya Vostoka, KUTV) opened its doors in Moscow. It became the first full-fledged Soviet training center for Soviet Muslims and for foreign communist cadres, principally from Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, and it impacted Soviet views of the East, as Lana Ravandi-Fadai and Masha Kirasirova have shown in “Red Mecca” (2015) and “The ‘East’ as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration” (2017), respectively. The text here is the English translation, published in 1954 in the collection J. V. Stalin: Works: Volume 7, of a Russian text published in 1925 in the principal Soviet newspaper, Pravda, rendering a speech that the 1924-1953 Chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) held to KUTV’s students in 1925.

Mao extends deep sympathy and support to people struggling against imperialism in Arab and African countries. This report was originally published in the People's Daily on April 29, 1961.

During the visit of Saddam Hussein to the Soviet Union, the delegation discussed with Soviet leaders the need for strengthening Iraqi-Soviet relations to give positive guidance on the situation in the Middle East. The Iraqi delegation also promoted their intention to develop relations with other Arab states in order to decrease the effects of imperialism. Topics of discussion also included Iraqi oil policy and domestic conflict.

This report emphasizes American propaganda in the Middle East, such as promoting democracy and American way of life, as well as its anti-Soviet propaganda. The report also extensively lists the Americans' participation in the region such as how much money and resources were devoted there, including from private institutions.

Materials provided by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin to CWIHP, following the publication of the Working Paper No. 40, "The KGB in Afghanistan." As with all Mitrokhin’s notes, his compilation on Soviet “active measures” in South and Southwest Asia is based on other smuggled-out notes and was prepared especially for CWIHP. Please read the Notes on Sources for information on the nature and limitations of these documents.

Honecker thanks Qaddafi for his contributions to the cause of the movement of progressive states in the Middle East and the defense against imperialism and Zionism. He expresses concern about the conflict in the Horn of Africa region and wants to arrange a meeting of GDR representative Werner Lamberz with Qaddafi in Tripoli. Further proposed topics for this meeting include talks with representatives of the Palestinian revolution and the continuing development of East German-Libyan relations. (There is a telegram from 1 December 1977 signed by Hermann Axen that refers to this meeting.)