| Review of: | From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Saud, and the Making of U.S.-Saudi Relations by Nathan J. Citino Ruling Shaikhs and Her Majesty's Government 1960-1969 by Miriam Joyce |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Brooks Wrampelmeier |
| Reviewed in: | Middle East Policy |
| Date accepted online: | 27/02/2004 |
| Published in print: | Volume 10, Issue 3, Pages 167-182 |
Book Reviews
Between the two world wars, British imperial interests were paramount in the Persian Gulf. Through its influence with the rising power of the Saudi ruler Abd al-Aziz and by its treaties with rulers of the peripheral Gulf Arab states, Great Britain maintained a relative degree of peace and stability in the region just as British and American companies began to obtain concessions to exploit the area's enormous oil reserves. Following World War II, however, the guardianship of Western economic and strategic interests in the region began to shift from Britain to the United States. The pace of this transition began to increase in the 1960s and culminated in 1971, when the British withdrew from their historic commitments in the Gulf. The extent to which the United States had assumed responsibility for the security of Western interests in the Gulf was dramatically illustrated in 1990-91, when American forces, with important but subordinate British military assistance, intervened to defeat the Iraqi threat to the independence of its Gulf Arab neighbors.
Together, the two books under review examine the period - 1950 to 1969 - which saw the waning of British primacy in the Persian Gulf. The first, Nathan J. Citino's
Diplomatic historian Nathan J. Citino states in the introduction that his intention in this impressively researched and carefully documented history is "to provide the sort of historical framework still needed for understanding Anglo-American collaboration and conflict throughout the Middle East" during this period. He argues that to do so one must first understand the European context that shaped postwar U.S. and British policies in the Middle East. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States, through the Marshall Plan and its role in NATO, focused its energies on European reconstruction and on defense against perceived Soviet threats. In the Middle East, the United States continued to count on the British empire to provide stability and assure Western access to oil. The United States, Citino explains, recognized that a top British priority was to maintain control of its access to "sterling oil" (i.e., oil for which payments were made in sterling rather than U.S. dollars) if Great Britain were to participate in the postwar multilateral economy and to play an effective role in the defense of Europe.
Accordingly, the United States and Britain shared a strong interest in maintenance of a "postwar petroleum order" which assured Gulf producer countries, Arab oil transit states and the major oil companies would all cooperate to provide a steady flow of inexpensive oil to the global economy. Whatever the commercial competition among American and British oil companies in the Gulf, the U.S. and British governments had the joint objective of preventing disruptions in that flow either by the Soviets or by local nationalist forces. Far from seeking to supplant the British as the guardian of Western interests in the Gulf, U.S. policy sought to maintain the British political and military presence there.
The thrust of Citino's argument is that what often appeared to be Anglo-American commercial rivalry in the 1950s over Gulf oil concessions reflected not so much direct economic competition as it did differences in tactics. The United States initially relied on the private corporate interests represented by the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) to achieve its objectives. In Saudi Arabia, U.S. policy was to promote amicable company-government relations by encouraging ARAMCO to make generous royalty payments to the Saudi rulers and to respond to reasonable requests for help in developing the Saudi economic infrastructure. Washington believed that private investment could best provide needed technical assistance and advice while U.S. official involvement in Saudi Arabia was kept to a minimum.
In contrast, Great Britain's policy was to uphold its imperial role in the region. Relying on treaty relationships with the peripheral Gulf Arab states, British officials advised local rulers, commanded local military levies and police, and established and staffed development boards. At times, British military as well as diplomatic intervention was required to put down uprisings against their Gulf clients, e.g., in Oman in 1954-55 and 1959, and to deter threats to their domains from neighboring states, e.g., the Saudi attempts to seize by force the potentially oil-rich Buraimi oasis shared by Abu Dhabi and Oman. Especially after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, British colonial administration became a target for Arab-nationalist forces opposed to Britain's continued political and military presence in Arabia.
In his analysis of the British-Saudi dispute over Buraimi, Citino argues that those historians who saw this as a U.S.-backed Saudi land-grab in the interests of ARAMCO failed to understand the nature of U.S. public-private cooperation in oil diplomacy. In fact, the dispute posed a dilemma for U.S. policy makers: either support Saudi demands on Buraimi and thereby help preserve ARAMCO's good relations with the Saudi government and continued U.S. access to the Dhahran Air Base, or support British authority in the Gulf at a time when it was already facing growing Arab-nationalist pressures.
The Eisenhower administration's response to the protracted Buraimi problem was continually to urge both parties to find a compromise. However, in relying on private American oil companies to assure continued U.S. access to Saudi oil, the administration found itself unable to restrain ARAMCO from supporting Saudi Arabia's efforts to expand its borders in eastern Arabia. The British did not accuse the U.S. government of sponsoring Saudi hegemonic ambitions, but they strongly suspected the United States of maintaining its position in Saudi Arabia at Britain's expense by yielding constantly to Saudi pressures.
Buraimi was far from an Anglo-American proxy war for oil resources, as some have portrayed it. In fact, the United States repeatedly refused to endorse Saudi claims in eastern Arabia, and Washington regarded its reliance on private companies as a way to avoid official involvement in Middle Eastern political disputes. Instead, the conflict reflected the contrasting approaches employed by the United States and Britain to secure oil revenues in the age of radical Arab nationalism.... Throughout the Eisenhower administration, these different historical approaches in the Middle East would complicate Anglo-American cooperation toward the common objectives of defending the postwar petroleum order (p. 37).
Citino traces these complications in the years that followed the death of King Abd al-Aziz in November 1953 and the accession of his son Saud. For a time, Saudi-U.S. and Saudi-ARAMCO relations were seriously strained by the new king's flirtation with Nasser's brand of Arab nationalism and by a dispute over the king's agreement to award Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis an exclusive contract to carry Saudi oil, an arrangement ARAMCO considered a breach of its concession rights. Saud joined Egypt's Nasser in opposing the creation in February 1955 of the Baghdad Pact, which joined Hashemite-ruled Iraq with Turkey, Iran and Britain to oppose Soviet penetration of the Middle East. While the United States had favored this alliance, it did not adhere to it, fearing that to do so would jeopardize its petroleum interests in Saudi Arabia and its efforts to find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Meanwhile, the Saudis exploited U.S. Cold War concerns to obtain American military equipment, the sale of which was opposed by the British, who complained that it would be used against their interests in eastern Arabia where the unresolved dispute over Buraimi continued to fester. Saudi fears of Anglo-Hashemite encirclement were met by British suspicions that the Saudis, financed by ARAMCO, were backing anti-British subversion across the Arab world. British requests that the U.S. government force ARAMCO to reduce the oil revenues paid to the Saudi government were ignored, as such interference was considered a threat to the U.S. strategy for preserving the postwar petroleum order.
The Suez crisis of 1956 was, in Citino's words, "a grave shock to the postwar petroleum order." Nasser's July 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal threatened the established relationships between Gulf oil producers, transit countries, petroleum majors and the Western powers. It also demonstrated how sharply U.S. and British policies diverged over how to protect access to Mideastern oil: "... It was during the second half of 1956 that the allies different policies came closest to destroying the postwar petroleum order" (p. 88).
As the United States and Great Britain began to despair of reaching an accommodation with Nasser, Washington sought to build up King Saud and his Islamic credentials as an alternative to Soviet-Egyptian influence in the Arab world. Here Citino has some critical things to say about the quality of Middle Eastern expertise in the United States that led President Eisenhower to believe Islam and Saud could serve as barriers to Soviet penetration of the region. The British, reasonably, felt this pro-Saud policy was unrealistic; they were more intent on curtailing Saud's support for Nasser than they were on enhancing his stature. The situation was further complicated by growing differences between Saud and his brother Crown Prince Faisal and by Arab-nationalist stirrings among oil workers in Saudi Arabia. Concerned for his own position, King Saud rebuffed U.S. requests that he break with Nasser or act as a mediator between Nasser and the Western powers.
The October 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli attacks on Egypt led to blockage by Nasser of the Suez Canal and sabotage of the oil pipeline from Iraq through Syria to the Mediterranean. Saud denounced the attacks and embargoed oil exports by ARAMCO to France and Britain. While distancing the United States from the attack on Egypt, Eisenhower worked to overcome the disruption in petroleum shipments by organizing a lift of Western Hemisphere oil to Europe. The United States succeeded in gaining Saud's cooperation with this emergency measure once Anglo-French agreement to evacuate their forces was announced. Despite the U.S.-British differences over the Suez invasion, "Eisenhower's aggressive actions to restore Europe's oil supplies revealed his priorities in the Middle East and reflected the allies common stake in the postwar petroleum order.... The weakening of British influence in the Middle East also presented Eisenhower with an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the terms of the postwar petroleum order" (pp. 110-111).
The U.S. response to the new situation was the "Eisenhower Doctrine" by which Washington offered bilateral aid to Middle Eastern countries prepared to resist Soviet aggression or communist subversion. This was the U.S. alternative to formally joining the Baghdad Pact. The policy also sought to find ways to redistribute Middle Eastern oil revenues to benefit non-oil-producing Arab countries and help stabilize the region. The president wanted to make Saud the center of this effort and invited the king to pay a state visit to Washington in February 1957. "For Eisenhower, courting Saud was not just a strategy for containing communism, but was also a way to render palatable to Arab and Muslim countries the Anglo-American rapprochement that was essential to restore the postwar petroleum order" (p. 128).
Continuing Anglo-Saudi tensions in eastern Arabia, where Omani rebels had taken refuge in Saudi Arabia, complicated U.S. efforts to help Britain maintain its position in the Gulf while simultaneously trying to build up Saud's standing in the Arab world. Moreover, Saud's inability to challenge seriously Nasser's leadership of Arab nationalist causes and growing disputes within the royal family over allocation of scarce economic resources brought about a weakening of the king's authority at home and of his prestige abroad. In the wake of the perceived Arab-nationalist threats to Western interests posed in 1958 by the civil war in Lebanon and the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, the United States came to accept that Crown Prince Faisal's policy of neutrality in Arab matters and his attention to economic and administrative reform of the kingdom were essential to survival of the Saudi regime and the preservation of American oil investments in the kingdom. The United States even found it possible to accept the creation in 1960 of OPEC, recognizing that an association of Arab and non-Arab oil producers devoted to improving their share of oil revenues was less threatening to Western industrialized economies than one dominated by Arab nationalist forces dedicated to redistributing oil wealth in the Arab world.
By the end of the Eisenhower era, Citino concludes, the U.S. reliance on private enterprise to expand American presence and influence had proven more successful than traditional British imperial practices in preserving the postwar petroleum order. Yet Eisenhower's policies, especially the U.S. role in the overthrow of Mossadegh's nationalist government in Iran in 1953, announcement of the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, and the 1958 decision to send the Marines into Lebanon, presaged the growing willingness of the United States to pursue an activist diplomacy and to display overt military power to preserve its access to oil and restore regional stability. The transfer of the guardianship of Western interests in the Gulf from British to American hands would take another decade, but the strategic basis for America to assume the leading role in the Gulf had been laid.
Citino's work is a welcome addition to historical studies of U.S. oil diplomacy and of U.S.-Saudi relations. The author's emphasis on the common interests of the United States and Britain in assuring access to Gulf oil for Western economic recovery and defense is a point often ignored by earlier historians who have interpreted U.S.-British policy differences in the Middle East as symptomatic of rivalry for oil and for preeminence. Some may challenge this reinterpretation of 1950s Anglo-American diplomacy in Arabia, but the author makes a persuasive case supported by extensive research in the U.S. and British official archives, diplomatic memoirs and even some Arabic primary sources. His extensive footnotes and a 15-page bibliography alone make this book a valuable resource for scholars. This is a work that is more likely to appeal to experts than to general readers, but it can be read with profit by anyone with an interest in the diplomatic history of this period.
Miriam Joyce's history of British-Gulf ruler relationships in the 1960s is, according to a jacket blurb by a former British ambassador in the Gulf, "an evocative, fair, sympathetic and well researched account of the final years of the British physical presence in the Gulf." This is hardly surprising as the author relies almost exclusively on the correspondence between British officials in the Gulf and the Foreign Office in London, supplemented by occasional U.S. diplomatic reports. Her method has been to summarize this correspondence. As a consequence, the reader obtains a first-hand sense of the variety of issues, ranging from the important to the pedestrian, that concerned the British political resident in Bahrain and his political agents in the various Gulf Arab states.
As the 1960s began, the political scene in the Gulf was becoming increasingly complex. The British still retained their historic protective commitments in the smaller Gulf states, and there was no pressure from local rulers to make any major changes in those longstanding relationships. Throughout this period, the Gulf rulers were being constantly reassured by British officials that Britain intended to honor its treaty obligations to them and would continue to maintain its political and military presence in the region. But, as Professor Joyce notes in her introduction, the Suez fiasco had harmed British prestige in the region, and Arab nationalist elements, encouraged by revolutionary regimes in Egypt and Iraq, were beginning to stir up dissention among oil workers and others. Gulf rulers were concerned about territorial encroachments from Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and there were unresolved border disputes among the shaikhdoms themselves, notably between Bahrain and Qatar.
Five chapters deal individually with the seven Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates), Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman up to the end of 1967. By means of British reporting, we learn the views of Gulf rulers and important merchants about the issues of concern to them. The reports reveal the rivalries and jealousies that preoccupied many of the ruling families, occasionally leading - with British approval - to the deposing of unpopular rulers by their close relatives. British officials in the Gulf sought to help resolve these disputes while encouraging Gulf rulers to invest their growing oil revenues in the economic and social betterment of their peoples and their poorer neighbors. Other important issues covered in these chapters include the independence of Kuwait and the almost immediate Iraqi invasion threat that followed; the claims of the shah of Iran to Bahrain and the Lower Gulf islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs; Saudi meddling in Buraimi and support for the Omani rebellion against Sultan Said bin Taymur of Muscat and Oman; and reactions to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
At the same time, Foreign Office officials continued to safeguard specific British economic interests and to assert British primacy in the affairs of the Gulf states against possible U.S. encroachment. For example, in a January 1963 conversation with the visiting American consul general from Dhahran, the political resident, Sir William Luce, said Britain accepted that American economic competition in the Gulf was inevitable; he hoped, however, that the United States would recognize that Britain must remain in the Gulf for the indefinite future to secure Europe's access to oil and contain Egyptian influence. The United States had raised its consulate in Kuwait to embassy status upon Kuwait's independence in 1962, but in late 1964 a State Department proposal to open a consulate or trade office in Dubai received no encouragement from Britain. U.S. officials nevertheless constantly assured the British that they had no wish to replace them as military protectors of the Gulf states.
In two other chapters Professor Joyce covers the reactions of the rulers to the January 1968 announcement that British policy had changed and that Britain would withdraw from its treaty responsibilities by 1971. Efforts by Gulf rulers to persuade the British to rethink this policy were unsuccessful, despite an offer by Shaikh Zayid of Abu Dhabi to defray the costs of stationing British forces in the Gulf. As the rulers became increasingly convinced that British withdrawal was certain, political agents encouraged the efforts of the Lower Gulf rulers to put together a federation, first of the Nine (Bahrain, Qatar and the seven Trucial States), then of the Eight (without Bahrain), and finally of the Seven (the UAE). The British reporting underscored the numerous difficulties hindering progress toward federation, especially the rivalries between Bahrain and Qatar, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi. A concluding chapter briefly takes the story up to the end of the British imperial presence in the Gulf and to the assumption by the Gulf states of the responsibility for their own external and internal affairs, including defense.
Professor Joyce is not, of course, the first historian of the emergence of the modern Gulf states. The Foreign Office files for this period have been extensively mined by others, e.g., Rosemarie Said Zahlan's
For the general reader, the book's organization offers some problems. A wealth of detail is presented, but in restricting herself to the material found in the official correspondence, Professor Joyce sometimes fails to provide the context for certain key events. Most seriously, the book does not examine in any depth the background to the reversal of British policy in the brief period between November 1967, when Minister of State Goronwy Roberts assured Gulf rulers that Britain's commitments would continue, and his return to the Gulf in January 1968 to announce Britain would relinquish its treaty responsibilities within three years. The author notes only that the decision was based on the worsening of Britain's financial position. Some fuller explanation of the circumstances in late 1967 that led Her Majesty's Government to make such a momentous decision would have been beneficial to readers not already well-acquainted with this subject.
The book contains source citations at the end of each chapter, but the use of footnotes would have been helpful to explain otherwise obscure references or to inform the reader of the outcome of some ongoing matter not self-evident in the official reporting. The inclusion of a bibliography of sources consulted would also have been desirable.