The end of the Suez Crisis in 1956 marked the shift from the age of British and French supremacy in the Near East to the regional and global domination of two rivaling superpowers who had forced the traditional European colonial powers to withdraw their forces from the Sinai. According to Avi Shlaim, although neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was directly responsible for the fundamental cause of the conflict in the Middle East, the contributions of the two global powers upon the conflict is both apparent and tremendous in exacerbating and broadening the crisis into a global catastrophe and shattering the fundamental core of the young Near Eastern nations created in the wake of the collapse of the traditional superpowers (Shlaim 146). The impact of the superpower rivalries in the Middle East were immediate and lasting, perhaps most evident in the country of Lebanon which to this day suffers from the repercussions of the failed diplomacy, civil war, and foreign invasions during the Cold War era. Although the United States of America had only deployed a sizeable defensive force into Lebanon in three instances, and for a limited amount of time, and the Soviet Union had no direct influence over the Lebanese affairs, the inherent actions of the two superpowers had compounded the national destabilization and ultimately the deconstruction of the nation. Despite the seemingly limited actions of Moscow and Washington, their actions had inherent consequences that had profound effect on the development of the current crisis and gives an acute insight on the development of the “weak[ened] state” such as Iraq whose domestic disorder can be paralleled to Lebanon’s situation (Feldman 143).