Page 461 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

CHAPTER IX

Gazelles and Lions

The Arab oil producers are militarily insignificant - gazelles . . . in
a world of lions.

J. William Fulbright, November 1973

It is one of the intellectual conceits of our day that the scientific and technologi­
cal advances of the past half-century, especially in methods of waging war,

have invalidated the strategic concepts which held good in the nineteenth
century and up to the First World War regarding the defence of the Middle
East against the expansionist aims of Russia. The old notions about the
safeguarding of the routes to India, the definition of spheres of influence in
western Asia, the maintenance of the independence of Turkey, Persia and

Afghanistan as buffer states or barrier powers for the defence of India -
everything, in fact, that went to make up the constituents of the ‘Great Game
played between Britain and Russia in the lands stretching from the Bosporus to
the Himalaya, has been rendered obsolete (so we have been told by the school

of strategic thought which has been in the ascendant these last two decades or
so) by the advent of nuclear weapons, by air power, by the passing of the
British raj in India, by the end of European dominion in Asia, by the emerg­
ence of the successor Asian nation-states, and by the ideological revolution
which has accompanied these great transformations. Changed political

circumstances, new techniques of warfare and advances in methods of trans­
portation and communication, so the same authoritative voices have assured

us, have likewise undermined the older doctrines about the primacy of sea
power, the preservation of Western naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean, the
acquisition and retention of naval stations around its shores, and the necessity

to command the sea lanes from Asia to Europe.
There has been about this insistent denunciation of the strategic concepts of

an earlier age as hopelessly outmoded and irrelevant to our contemporary
condition more than a suggestion of despair, of a compelling need to rationalize
the dispirited retreat of the West from the world east of Suez by representing H

as the logical consequence of a revolutionary change in strategic imperauves,
and not (as it might otherwise be interpreted) as a manifestation of t e