Page 441 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

438 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the wars, as Anglo—Persian and I PC obtained concessions in Kuwait, Qatar,
the Trucial Shaikhdoms and Oman.
The French government, which held a minority shareholding in CFP,
pursued much the same policy in Iraq and the lower Gulf, either through the
agency of IPC or through CFP’s direct association with British Petroleum, and
later Shell, in concessionary ventures after the Second World War. The United
States never sought to acquire the same measure of strategic control over
Middle-Eastern oil reserves as did Britain and France, the most pertinent
reasons for her abstention being her possession of considerable reserves of her
own and the absence of any American interests of a vital nature in the Middle
East. During the Second World War, as we have seen, the United States
government seriously considered the acquisition of a shareholding in the major
American oil companies operating in the region, and more particularly in
ARAMCO’s concession in Saudi Arabia. But with the termination of hos­
tilities and in the face of strong opposition from the companies the idea was
abandoned. Thereafter the United States virtually entrusted the protection of
its strategic interest in Middle-Eastern oil to the major American companies,
which meant, in effect, to the four parent companies of ARAMCO, whose
Saudi Arabian concession eventually came to constitute the principal foreign
oil reserves of the United States.
How and when in the past two decades the Western world’s indifference to
the retention of strategic control over its Middle-Eastern sources of oil took
root is not readily determinable; although there is little doubt that it was the
consequence, as Correlli Barnett has remarked, ‘of following Keynes instead of
Clausewitz’ in the formulation of Western policy towards the Middle-Eastern
*
oil states. The erosion of British and French power in the Middle East went
hand in hand with - indeed, was in large measure the direct consequence of-
the growth of a debilitating conviction that the tides of history were flowing
against the exercise by Western Europe of any power beyond its shores; that in
the Middle East the Arabs’ and Persians’ hour had come; and that the whole
question of access to oil was a purely commercial matter of supply and demand,
an outlook summed up by the fashionable precept of the day, ‘the Arabs cannot
drink their oil’. With the departure of Britain from the Gulf at the close of 1971
the last pretence of maintaining any kind of physical hold over sources of
supply was abandoned. Henceforth, Britain, France, Western Europe in
general and Japan would have to rely for the bulk of their oil supplies upon the
goodwill of the Gulf oil states and (to whatever extent it might prove effective)
upon the influence and authority wielded in the area by the United States. The
United States, however, as has already been observed, had entrusted the care
of its strategic oil interests to ARAMCO, and ARAMCO had proved unequal
to the trust when put to the test in October 1973 • So the United States is now in
• See ‘Oil - strategic importance and future supplies’, a seminar report by the Royal United Services Insti

for Defence Studies, June 1973-