Hafez Assad and the Arab (and wider) World

Hafez Assad moved Syria ever closer to the Soviet Union (and then lost it). And he set out to position Syria as a regional power and himself as the leader of the Arab world, filling the vacuum left by Nasser, and that meant taking on Israel (or at least at first it did), it also meant rivalry with Saddam Hussein, and, as we have seen, it meant interfering in the Lebanon Civil War and, indeed, its occupation of Lebanon (so I won’t revisit that). But all this also meant that, one way or another, whether he wanted it or not, there would be a relationship with America.