The quickly resolved crisis of the so-called United Arab Republic has a few lessons for the student of Near Eastern affairs. The first is that the regimes erected on the ruins of British and French presence are not so stable as their improvised leaders pretend; the second lesson is that their policy of conquest or, rather, non-colonialism, carries in it the seeds of destruction; and the third lesson points to the great force of nationalism which in this, as in other parts of the world, is shaping the destinies of old and new peoples.

Judging by its aspects in the Near Eastern countries, nationalism is a complex phenomenon. In the eyes of the Egyptians, for example, the awakening is baptized by the name of “revolution,” although for the Western eye the country seems to dream the eternal dreams of the slow-rolling Nile. The catchwords on everybody's lips are “industrialization,” “unity of all Arabs,” and “Israel must be destroyed,” —a mixture of realism and illusions.