Nasser’s Arab Policy

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29715, 8 January 1962, Page 10

Nasser’s Arab Policy

President Nasser seems intent upon publicly renouncing his one-time ambition to lead the Arab world into unity. At least, he is emphasising the breach with still more of his former friends. The Imam of the Yemen and the King of Saudi Arabia are the latest Arab leaders to be denounced. Conditions in their countries, President Nasser said recently, were- “ against the law of justice “ and the law of God ”, President Nasser felt it necessary to go further than mere denunciation in the case of the Imam of the Yemen. In 1958, much was made of an agreement providing for the Yemen to associate with the newlyformed United Arab Republic (of Egypt and Syria). The union was to be known as the United Arab States and, while each State preserved its own system of government, economic and foreign policies were to be coordinated and the armed forces were to come under a unified command. This was always an unlikelylooking arrangement as far as the Yemen was concerned, because the Imam, who is both spiritual and temporal ruler of his five million people has never moved from his belief that the Yemen must, in essentials, remain isolated from the rest of the world, and that the only real authority in the country must remain the Imam. However, the union was cherished by President Nasser. No doubt he hoped that more Arab States would rally to it, according Egypt leadership of a powerful association—-

and access to the riches of the oil-producing States. Now, however, President Nasser has decided to sever Egypt’s link with the Yemen and to show no wish for friendship with the King of Saudi Arabia. These actions, following upon the defection of Syria from the U.A.R., surely signify the ■uin of President Nasser’s rormer Arab policy, a policy to which he sought earnestly to attach the Egyptian people. Will President Nasser concentrate for the time being upon consolidating Egypt’s position, turning his country’s back on the Arabs and taking refuge in isolationism? Or has he fresh alignments in mind?

After the Iraq revolution, men close to the top tried to use the occasion to make President Nasser, in effect, an overlord in Iraq. But, though the revolution took Iraq away from the West, it did not bring it any closer to President Nasser. The Iraqis have pursued an independent line in the Middle East, an independence which, in fact, lined up the Arab States against Iraq’s designs on Kuwait. President Nasser’s recent withdrawal of the small Egyptian contingent from the Arab force founded to protect the independence of Kuwait may be a hint of a Nasser-Kassem rapprochement. President Nasser’s apparent retreat appears to be no more than a temporary expedient. The interesting question is where he will be found in the new power alignments that are surely in the process of forming among the ever-shifting politics of the Middle East.