The Middle East was arguably the first theater of the Cold War, which manifested itself in a number of dramatic regional developments in the four decades after 1946. In that year, Joseph Stalin's delay in removing Soviet troops on schedule from Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan, where pro-Soviet autonomist regimes had been set up, brought U.S. counterpressure and a crisis that ended only with an Iranian-Soviet agreement that included the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The 1947 Truman Doctrine, arming Turkey and Greece, was the first of several U.S. military doctrines covering the Middle East and was aimed at the Soviets. Regional nationalizers of British assets in the 1950s, especially Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, were treated as dangerous and pro-Communist, and, in Mosaddeq's case, overthrown at U.S. instigation. U.S. backing for Israel was matched by Soviet backing for the Arab position and arming of favored Arab regimes, first Nasser's Egypt, and, more recently, Baathist Syria and Iraq. With the withdrawal of the British east of Suez, Saudi Arabia and especially Iran became the pillars and guardians of U.S. policy. These and other oil-rich states could afford to buy large quantities of advanced arms from the United States, while the strategic nonoil countries, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt, became three of the five largest recipients of U.S. aid, mostly military in nature. After the Soviet invasion of 1979, Afghanistan became a center for U.S.-Soviet military conflict.

Such concentration on the Middle East, which with regard to the Soviet Union was partly owing to proximity and shared borders, also grew out of American and Soviet concerns for the re-gion's oil and strategic location.