Page 265 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

262 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

same time, however, Faisal expected the United States to exert pressure upon
the British to compel them to concede his right to his ‘ancestral domains’ in
eastern Arabia, i.e. to make over slices of Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Oman to him.

It was all very bewildering for the administration and the State Department,
and their perplexity was not eased by developments in Arabia in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Rather late in the day the realization began to dawn in
Washington that Britain’s abandonment of Aden and her retreat from the Gulf
had removed the major stabilizing influence from the peninsula. Over the same
period of time, by a further irony, ARAMCO’s position in Saudi Arabia had
begun to deteriorate, as the Saudi regime, taking at face value ARAMCO’s
pious avowals for years past that it was, in reality, a Saudi Arabian enterprise,
embarked upon the creeping nationalization of the company’s assets through
the device of ‘participation’ in its shareholding. Second thoughts were now
very much the order of the day in Dhahran, though they seemed to yield
nothing more than the desperate counsel of continued appeasement. Thus, as
we shall see in a later chapter, ARAMCO carried out to the letter the Saudi
government’s orders on the implementation of the oil embargo of October
1973, even to the withholding of supplies from the United States navy. The
company had travelled a long way since the proposal made thirty years earlier
that it should earmark a proportion of its reserves for the use of that same navy.
With Britain gone from the Gulf and the days of ARAMCO’s ascendancy in

Saudi Arabia numbered, the United States was, and still is, hard put to provide
for the protection of its own and the Western world’s interests in the region.
Faute de mieux, it had to settle in the early 1970s for the pretence that these
interests could be adequately safeguarded by Saudi Arabia and Persia, acting in
tandem and with the encouragement and support of the United States. The
overthrow of the shah has now removed Persia from this arrangement, leaving
the United States in a position of trying to exercise some control over events in
the Gulf from behind an Arab facade, i.e. through her ‘special relationship’
with Saudi Arabia. What has yet to emerge is whether the United States
actually has any clear idea of the course upon which she has embarked, or
whether she has merely taken ARAMCO’s place at the wheel of the Saudi
chariot.
Oil and money are at the heart of the American involvement in Saudi Arabia
- the guaranteed supply of oil to the United States, in the first instance, and the
safe disposal of the financial surpluses Saudi Arabia has accumulated from her
oil revenues, in the second. The problems that the surplus revenues of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pose to the Western world in
general will be considered more fully in a later chapter. For the moment it may
be noted that the total accumulated surplus revenues of OPEC were estimate

by the United States Treasury in October 1977 to be of the order of $t33>o°°
million, the bulk of which was owned by only three countries - Saudi Ara 1a,
Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (i.e. Abu Dhabi). Some $50,000 mi on