Communist Containment in the Middle East: Emergence of the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)
The 1950s can be described as a decade filled with some uncertainties, but many prosperities. The Cold War had just ensued between the United States and the USSR, and in the midst of this geopolitical friction, powers from around the world began forming alliances necessary to contain the threats they feared. One of those alliances was forged through joint efforts facilitated by the United States and the United Kingdom; their mission: degrade a Red Scare in the Middle East.
While the Soviets were continuing to expand their spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, one of the regions they were desperate to conquer was the Middle East. This was mainly due to economic reasons. Fearing a potential domino effect in the region, a coalition of Middle Eastern countries—with the help of the United States and the United Kingdom—came up with an intergovernmental alliance aimed to fend off Communist expansionism. This became known as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), a military alliance that lasted between 1958 to 1979. Originally the Baghdad Pact, the organization was first established in 1956 by Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Their sole purpose was to prevent Soviet influence from expanding in lengths towards the Middle East. However, as Iraq dealt with a violent coup that abolished the constitutional monarchy and installed Arab Socialist Karim Qasim into power, the Baghdad Pact was eventually renamed to the Central Treaty Organization in 1958. CENTO, unlike NATO, didn’t function as a collective security organization but was instrumental in sponsoring various economic projects across the Middle East. The most notable was the Van-Sufian railway, a 362 kilometer railway system that traveled from London to Tehran, via Turkey. The organization, however, was hollowed with failures in between, and many felt that the activities pursued by CENTO weren’t enough to contain the spread of Communism in the Middle East. By 1979, following the Iranian revolution, Iran pulled out of CENTO, and this mutual security alliance was disbanded in its entirety.
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