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Arabia, the Gulf and the West

awTn^n011118 S° again’ If the Soviet Union, which has never been a formid-

, power, can evolve into one in the space of a few years, so also can
an<? mUC1? cmOre effectively. It is to this end, and to ensuring (in alliance
i he United States) Western naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean, the Red
ea and the Gulf that Western Europe and Japan should be directing their
efforts, instead of wasting them in an endeavour to cajole the refractory and
capricious regimes of the Gulf into acting with a sense of responsibility to the
world at large.
How much time may be left to Western Europe in which to preserve or

recover its strategic inheritance east of Suez it is impossible to foretell. While
thepax Britannica endured, that is to say, from the fourth or fifth decade of the
nineteenth century to the middle years of this century, tranquillity reigned in
the Eastern Seas and around the shores of the Western Indian Ocean. An
ephemeral calm still lingers there, the vestigial shadow of the old imperial
order. If the history of the past four or five hundred years indicates anything,

however, it is that this fragile peace cannot last much longer. Most of Asia is
fast lapsing back into despotism - most of Africa into barbarism - into the
condition, in short, they were in when Vasco da Gama first doubled the Cape
to lay the foundations of Portuguese dominion in the East. What now seems
destined to succeed is a struggle for supremacy in the Indian Ocean and the
Arabian Sea among the naval powers of the world, along the lines of the
campaigns periodically waged by Portugal, Holland, England and France in

the centuries following da Gama’s momentous voyage of discovery. For
da Gama’s successors the keys to command of the Arabian Sea and control
of the maritime trade of Arabia, Persia and India were Muscat, Hormuz and
Aden. Others after them, notably the British rulers of India in the nineteenth
century, reached the same strategic conclusions and acted upon them ac­
cordingly. The paramountcy which Britain was eventually to establish in the

Gulf and around the shores of Arabia had its beginnings in the defensive
engagement concluded with the Al Bu Said sultan of Oman in response to
Bonaparte’s occupation of Egypt in the summer of 1798. Oman is still the
key to command of the Gulf and its seaward approaches, just as Aden re­
mains the key to the passage of the Red Sea. The Western powers have
already thrown away one of these keys; the other, however, is still within
their reach. Whether, like the captains-general of Portugal long ago, t ey

have the boldness to grasp it has yet to be seen.