Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, foreign policy was a much simpler venture as the world found itself functioning under the umbrella of just two superpowers, led by and acting under the auspices of either Washington or Moscow. The fall of Communism left a vacuum in the Middle East, as the now-extinct USSR had no allegiances to the Middle East in which it fought a series of proxy wars and conflicts with the United States. What transpired following the end of Moscow’s reign as a world superpower was the creation of several diplomatically independent states in the Middle East. Where Moscow once supported Syria, Egypt, and Iraq while arming said nations’ leaders, they found themselves increasingly dependent on other sources for trade and international subsidy such as the EU and the United States. The foreign policy then drove the security policy, baited by American and EU sponsorship acting independently of the UN. Today, Egypt, once the sworn enemy of Israel (whose closest international ally is Washington), receives America’s second-largest international aid package. This of course is contingent upon the maintenance of a lasting peace as well as other conditions detailed in the Camp David Accords of 1978. The UN and the EU’s parts in the conflict were minimal, as security policies of the two comprised of a minimal militaristic component and a far larger foreign policy component. Pinar Bilgin observes in Regional Security in the Middle East how the fragile Mediterranean “as an alternative spatial representation began to take shape from the 1970s onward largely in line with the development and changing security conception and practices of the European Union,” a group whose policies toward the region “have been shaped around three major concerns: energy security (understood as the sustained flow of oil and natural gas at reasonable prices); regional stability (understood as domestic stability especially in countries in geographically North Africa); and the cessation of the Israel/Palestine conflict”[5]. Unlike the US and USSR, whose motives will be examined later, the EU was interested solely in the protection of their economic preservation and the prevention of any armed conflict from spilling into their geographic vicinity. In addition to the Arab-Israeli crisis, EU Member States such as Italy, France, and Spain faced growing resentment in the Maghreb (Arab North Africa) as a corollary of imperial European rule. The EU’s policies were hence different from “non-EU actors [who] encouraged and supported the search for security within a Euro-Mediterranean framework”; the EU has almost “single-handedly sought to construct a Euro-Mediterranean Region to meet its own domestic economic, societal, and, to a much lesser extent, military security interests”[6]. The American and Soviet interest in the region was also one of economic, political, and security nature, but on a much larger scale. Buzan and Waever note in their Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security how: “The United States and the Soviet Union were latecomers as major players in Middle Eastern regional security, though the former had long-standing oil interests there. The two superpowers were drawn into a pattern of regional turbulence that was already strongly active. Their interest in the region was heightened by the fact that, like Europe, the Middle East sat on the boundary between the spheres of communism and ‘free’ worlds. Stalin’s aggressive policy after 1945 had pushed Turkey and Iran into the arms of the West. Turkey became a member of NATO, and was thus fixed into the main European front of the Cold War. Until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran fell increasingly under American sway, not only through corporate oil interests, but also as part of the loose alliance arrangements that connected American containment clients in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. To counter this US success right on its borders, the Soviet Union tried to play in the Arab world behind this front line, by establishing political and military links to the radical regimes and movements that sprang up in the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s (Syria, PLO, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen)”[7]>