Page 8 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

When Great Britain withdrew from her political and military position in the
Gulf at the close of 1971, thereby relinquishing the responsibility she had
borne for 150 years for the maintenance of peace and security in the region, the
occasion was little remarked by a world intent upon other preoccupations.
There was slight disposition in the West, and certainly none in Asia or Africa,
to question the expediency of a decision whose correctness was taken as
self-evident in an age which had seen the dismantling of Europe’s overseas
empires. Even among the few who harboured doubts about both the wisdom
and the propriety of Britain’s action there was a certain resigned acceptance of
the fact that, in the light of the general infirmity of will which characterized
much of the Western world, it was more or less inevitable. Less than two years
after the British withdrawal the world had good reason to mark its conse­
quences, as the Arab oil-producing states of the Gulf imposed an embargo
upon the export of oil to some Western countries, demanded assurances of
political sympathy from others as a condition of sale, and in company with the
shah of Persia raised the price of oil to exorbitant heights.
With the loss of even the tenuous strategic control over the Gulf’s oil
reserves which the British presence provided, the nations of the free world
have had to rely for their continued access to these reserves upon the goodwill
of the governments in power in the Gulf states. The price of this goodwill has
been the acquiescence by the Western powers and Japan in the repeated raising
of the price of crude oil, a process to which there seems no foreseeable end.
Apart from its adverse effects upon their economies, this policy of appease­
ment, like all policies conceived in a similar spirit, affords the nations of the
West no guarantee whatever of the security of oil supplies from the Gulf. On
the contrary, by confirming the governments of the Gulf states in their estima­
tion of their own importance and, conversely, of the flaccidity of the West, it
disposes them even more to believe that they are free to act in the wilful fashion
which has consistently marked their conduct in the past.
For all its gloss of recently acquired modernity, which so beguiles the foreign
eye, the Gulf today is very much as it has always been - turbulent, backward,
intrinsically unstable - and it is this instability which poses the greatest threat
to Western interests in the region. The causes of this instability are manifold:
some - dynastic rivalries, racial differences, sectarian antipathies, tribal ven­
dettas - are endemic in the Gulf; others - the impact of oil wealth, the