The Arab Cold War was a period of political rivalry in the Arab World from the early 1950s to the late 1970s as part of the broader Cold War. The generally accepted beginning of the Arab Cold War was the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which ultimately led to Gamal Abdel Nasser becoming President of Egypt in 1956. Thereafter, newly-established Arab republics defined by revolutionary secular nationalism, and largely drawing inspiration from Nasser's Egypt, were engaged in political rivalries of varying degrees of ferocity with conservative traditionalist Arab monarchies, led chiefly by Saudi Arabia. The approximate end point of this period of internecine rivalry and conflict is generally viewed as being the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which culminated in the installation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the leader of Iran's theocratic government. Thereafter, the bitterness of intra-Arab strife was eclipsed by a new era of Arab-Iranian tensions.
Nasser espoused secular, pan-Arab nationalism, and socialism as a response to the Islamism, and rentierism of the Arab monarchies, as well as their perceived complicity in Western meddling in the Arab World.