Arms and Aggression in the Middle East

Abstract

The authors' understanding of the relationship between the cold war and enduring rivalry in the Third World has been hampered by a tendency to view international conflicts as relatively isolated phenomena. The authors address this question by analyzing the impact of superpower arms transfers on armed interventions in the Middle East from 1948 to 1991. The evidence suggests that arms transfers from the United States to Israel restrained the level of military aggression in the region, on the part of both Israel and its Arab rivals. Soviet arms transfers, however, had the opposite effect. This latter pattern is attributed more to the Soviet Union's inability to restrain its clients than to its active promotion of regional conflict. The authors' conclusions are based on a Poisson regression analysis of time-series data derived from the Overt Military Interventions database and the arms trade registers compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.