Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign US-brokered accords, leading to the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty.
Mass protests topple Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; Ayatollah Khomeini returns and Iran becomes an Islamic Republic.
NASA launches Voyager 1 to study Jupiter and Saturn; it later becomes the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.
NASA's Viking 1 lander touches down on Mars and returns the first images from the planet's surface.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq invades Iran, beginning an eight-year war of attrition that kills hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands of people flee Vietnam by sea after 1975; many die at sea and others are resettled, mostly in Western countries.
A multi-sided civil war devastates Lebanon for fifteen years, with intervention by Syria, Israel and other foreign forces.