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The ‘Sting* 439

much the same case as Western Europe and Japan, with no security of access to
the oil reserves of the Gulf beyond what she can obtain by pursuing the
hazardous policy, bequeathed to her by ARAMCO, of identifying herself and
her interests with the present Saudi regime.
Now and for some years to come, Western Europe and Japan must draw
their major supplies of oil from an area of extreme political instability, relying
for the uninterrupted continuance of these supplies upon the good faith and
good sense of regimes notorious for their fickle and contentious behaviour. It is
not a comforting thought. The Middle-Eastern members of OPEC have
broken almost every agreement they have entered into since 1970, whether it
was the Libyan settlement in September of that year, or the Tehran agreement
in February 1971, or the Geneva formula for the adjustment of prices against
the international value of the dollar, or the provisions for the extension of the
1954 Persian consortium agreement, or the timetables for the implementation
of participation, or the prices at which the oil companies could buy back
participation crude. Nearly every pledge by an Arab oil state not to use oil as a
political weapon has been dishonoured, nearly every undertaking to reduce oil
prices or moderate price increases has been broken. In contrast, almost every
threat to restrict or embargo the shipment of oil, to reduce production or to
raise oil prices has been carried out. It is a sorry record; yet nearly every
Western government continues to make public avowals of its faith in the
essential reasonableness and good intentions of the OPEC cartel.
For Western Europe to have abandoned all vestige of strategic control over
its major sources of oil is folly enough; but to compound this folly by offering
further hostages to fortune in the shape of earnest predictions about oil
shortages, embargoes and price rises to come can only be construed as evidence
of a profoundly felt death-wish. Yet this is exactly what Western governments
and the garrulous tribe of Western pundits have been doing for some time now,
apparently oblivious of the part played by similar predictions in bringing about
the OPEC offensive in the autumn of 1973. Whether oil shortages will occur in
the years ahead it is beyond the power of anyone to predict with utter certainty.
Much will depend upon the discovery and exploitation of new oil reserves,
upon the rate of depletion of the known ones, upon the levels of oil consump­
tion in the industrial and non-industrial countries of the world, upon the
development of alternative sources of energy and the increased utilization of
existing ones - in short, upon a long list of variable and even unforeseeable
factors. What can be said with some assurance is that it is unwise in the extreme
for the West to shape its current policy towards OPEC upon the basis of
hypothetical oil shortages in the future. To do so is to play straight into the
cartel’s hands, allowing it to manipulate the West for its own political and
financial purposes. What these purposes are has already been indicated.
Whether OPEC, and its Middle-Eastern members in particular, has the power
and the skill to go on accomplishing them is again dependent upon a number of