Page 379 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

376 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

and to help the companies gain the upper hand of OPEC at Tehran at the
outset of 1971. The companies lost the contest, not because their adversaries
were stronger but because their own governments were indecisive and they
themselves were enfeebled by their own disunity. Too many of the companies,

and the American majors in particular, were preoccupied, not with the objects
for which the grand alliance of majors and independents had been formed, but
with the jealous preservation of their individual concessionary privileges, or
with stealing a march upon their rivals, or with warding off the evil eye of
accusations of collusion. As a result, they were irresolute or equivocal in their
reaction to OPEC’s bombast and shrill menaces. Yet, for all that their defeat
was partly self-inflicted, at least it can be said of them that they made an effort
to oppose the OP EC cartel, which is more than can be said of the governments
of the West, then or in the years to follow.

The argument that was used at the time, and which has been used ad
nauseam ever since, to justify the supine behaviour of the Western powers, and
of the United States and Britain in particular, towards OPEC from the spring
of 1970 onwards was that any show of firmness over oil prices would have
brought retribution in the form of an oil embargo, something that the peoples
of Western Europe and the United States were in no mood to tolerate. It is not

an argument that reflects much credit upon those who made it, or upon those
on whose behalf it was made. If the assertion is true, it says little for the spirit
and temper of the peoples of the West; if it is false, it indicates in what low
esteem they are held by their own governments. But in any case, how well in
the long run did the timid and feeble reaction of the United States and British
governments to the leap-frogging tactics of the OPEC governments from 1970
onwards serve the interests of the American and British peoples or those of the
rest of the Western industrial world? Did it save them from further price
increases, or did it merely ensure that these increases when they came would be

more exorbitant than before? Is it not possible that a determined stand,
especially in Libya in 1970 or at Tehran in 1971, with all the attendant risks of
an embargo — risks that were in all probability far less real than the faint­
hearted advocates of appeasement have made them out to be - would have
injected a measure of sanity into the fevered colloquies of OPEC and averted
thb economic dislocation which overtook the industrial world after October

1973?
Questions of this kind are usually answered, or evaded, by reference to those
twin hobgoblins, the ‘energy gap’ and the ‘oil shortage’, whose existence was
discovered late in 1971 and thereafter frantically proclaimed to a bewildere
world by a weird miscellany of Western sages, oracles and environmentalists.
That the ‘energy gap’ and the ‘oil shortage’ were then, as now, sPectra“an^
was of little moment to the Western governments most concernedBelie! n
them, real or assumed, offered a splendid excuse to the United Sta tes, Br
and French governments to do what they wanted to do anyway, viz. to b