The 1958 merger of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic was the first of a series of dramatic realignments throughout the Middle East, inspired by the vision of Gamal Abdal Nasser. Syria had been moving in the Egyptian dictator's ideological direction since the fall of a rightist military regime in 1954: the new junta , dominated by the socialist Ba'ath party , had followed Egypt in recognizing Mao's China and acquiring Soviet arms, Squeezed between Washington ( which backed anti-Soviet Arab governments against their nonaligned neighbors ) and a growing domestic Communist movement, Syria's leaders decided to put their pan-Arabist notions to the test.National borders, after all,were a Western invention: Syria would lose nothing and gain untold strength by melding with dynamic Egypt.

More changes followed quickly. Yemen, though ruled by a conservative monarch, sought security by affiliating itself with the U.A.R. in a confederation called the United Arab States, The Western oriented kingdom of Iraq and Jordan formed a rival union. In Saudi Arabia, King Saud was forced to cede authority to his relatively pro-Egyptian brother Faisal after being implicated in a plot on Nasser's life. In Lebanon, civil war erupted between Syrian-backed Arab nationalists and supporters of pro-Western president Camille Chamoun. In Iraq, when Premier Nuri al-Said decided to aid Chamoun, pro-Egyptian officers revolted-killing Said along with King Faisal II and most of the royal family. The Iraqi-Jordanian federation was no more.

Fearing the spread of Nasserism to Lebanon, the United States sent 10,000 troops and sponsored talks between the warring factions. A compromise led to elections, and General Fuad Chehab less enthusiastically pro-Western and friendlier to Nasser than Chamoun became president.

Except for Jordan, all the Arab nations had now fallen more or less into Cairo's camp. But they soon fell out again. Iraq's strongman, Abdul Karim Kassem, developed a bitter personal rivalry with his Egyptian counterpart . The Syrians came to resent Nasser's authoritarianism, while the Saudis and Yemen resisted his socialism . And by 1961 , when Syria seceded from the U.A.R. , Arab unity lay in ruins.