Page 502 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions
499

living. When their governments threaten to destroy the oilfields and oil instal­
lations they overlook the fact that they, too, have hostages to fortune, whether

in the shape of their financial and commercial assets abroad or in the form of
power stations, water-distillation plants, oil refineries, docks, airports and
other facilities in the Gulf, all of which are vulnerable to technical disruption or

sabotage. They depend upon the West, also, for the bulk of their armaments,
for the training of their armed forces, for technical instruction, and for the
maintenance and replacement of the complicated weaponry, gadgetry and

aircraft with which they have equipped themselves. If these armaments and
services were denied them, the alternative would be to procure them from the
Soviet bloc, which is hardly an attractive prospect for the regimes in power in

the Gulf today, whose survival largely depends, in the last resort, upon
Western support.
If a Western embargo upon trade, or similar economic and political

measures, should fail to induce the governments of the Gulf oil states to lift any
restrictions they might have imposed upon the supply of oil, the Western
powers may have to resort to an occupation of the oilfields. Legally speaking,

they would be entitled to do so, under the doctrine of necessity in international
law, especially if they had by that time been reduced to desperate economic

straits. The likelihood that such a contingency might arise has increased with
every passing year during the last decade, as the elements of instability
present in Arabia and the Gulf have grown more threatening and diverse. As
any change of regime in one or more of the Gulf states is bound to be in a radical

direction, the consequences for Western interests are likewise bound to be
adverse, particularly if the new revolutionary order is of a Marxist tinge and
likely to involve the Soviet Union intimately in the Gulf’s affairs. In such an

eventuality, the pressures upon the West to intervene to secure its vital oil
supplies may become irresistible. If a recourse to arms does prove necessary,
however, it will be because of the dismal policy of drift and propitiation the
West has followed for a decade past, instead of employing the hundred and one

political and economic weapons it had, and still has, at its disposal to impress

upon the Gulf states that it will not suffer its great strategic interests in the
region to be set at naught by their ill-intentioned antics and inflated preten­
sions.

There was a time, earlier in this century and in the last, when the powers of

urope were inclined to look upon the realms and principalities of the Middle

^ast with a certain degree of wonder, not unmixed with disdain. While their
wn interests, ambitions and rivalries might require them to treat with a
?e any sultans and amirs, sharifs and saiyids, bashaws and beglerbegs in

ands between the Golden Horn and the Hindu Kush, they could not bring
Q^.mse Ves to take most of them seriously. To European statesmen these
utal potentates were at once sinister and absurd, their pretensions