GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

Book Review

Power Vacuum? The Persian Gulf after British Withdrawal

MADAWI AL-RASHEED

Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf: Power Politics in Transition

by faisal bin salman al-saud

London, I. B. Tauris, 2004. 200 pages

Hardback: £45

he starting point for this book is the decision of Britain to withdraw from the Persian Gulf in 1968 and its actual withdrawal in 1971. The author’s central thesis is that no other superpower was ready to replace Britain in the region at the time. The United States was preoccupied with Vietnam, while the Soviet Union was still maintaining a cautious foreign policy. Al-Saud is firmly convinced that when British power was in decline, other superpowers never established unquestionable dominance or control over the Persian Gulf. Given this vacuum, Gulf politics went “local”, leaving Iran, the strongest and most ambitious and capable regional force, to determine and reorder the political landscape.

The book consists of six chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter is a very brief historical sketch of the main threads in regional relations, with the focus largely on Iran, and chiefly its territorial claims, which had remained dormant under the pax Britannica over the Persian Gulf. The withdrawal of Britain and the shrinking of British influence rekindled these claims.

The second chapter analyses the context of the British decision, under the leadership of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, to withdraw from the Persian Gulf, Iran’s response, and the role of the United States, the ally of both Britain and Iran. Iran’s claim over Bahrain Island and its maritime disputes with Saudi Arabia dominated regional politics, but did not result in military confrontations. Rather, the road to diplomatic solutions, as suggested by Britain, and in the context of the United Nations, began to ease tension between the main players in the Persian Gulf.

The third chapter examines the Nixon doctrine, according to which Iran was to play a vital role for US policy in the Persian Gulf. The doctrine led to an intimate relationship between Iran and the superpower endeavouring to replace Britain as the “guardian” of the Gulf through the supply of arms and technology. Al-Saud argues that the Shah of Iran initially sought to develop his military capabilities and preserve the security of his country without relying on external help, which was obviously not in line with Washington’s wishes. At this stage, the dispute over Bahrain resurfaced in Iran’s foreign policy (chapter five). A combination of history and strategy supported Iranian claims, but the author ignores the fact that close US–Iranian relations during this period facilitated an uncompromising Iranian position.

In chapter six, al-Saud examines the year of British withdrawal (1971), when London’s goal was to leave behind a stable regional structure. Iran was able to take over the islands of Tunb and Abu Musa, an objective achieved at surprisingly little cost. In addition to military power, Iran pursued a diplomatic policy that “pacified” countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which in the author’s opinion would otherwise have objected to Iranian occupation of the two islands. By 1971, Britain moved from being a hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf to being a mediator in territorial disputes, some of which are still awaiting resolution.

The epilogue confirms the book’s early hypothesis, namely, that pax Britannica gave way to pax Iranica. The rapid withdrawal of Britain, according to the author, left the Persian Gulf “without a regional security structure or rules for co-existence among regional players” (p. 126). In such a climate, territorial disputes dominated the political and international relations of the area. This is not surprising given the arbitrary nature of state boundaries in the region.

The book’s central thesis is based on a special understanding of the nature of the British presence in the Persian Gulf. Al-Saud overlooks the specific way in which Britain exercised its influence and hegemony through local sheikhs. He was perhaps unwilling to expose relationships that all ruling families, including that of Saudi Arabia, were eager to camouflage and even deny.

Furthermore, given that Saudi Arabia features in the title of the book, it is most surprising that the author does not give sufficient attention to its role in Gulf politics during the critical years of 1968–71. One would expect a whole chapter at least to be devoted to understanding the stance of King Faisal, his manoeuvres with the Americans, and his serious domestic concerns. What was the announced and unannounced Saudi reaction to Britain’s decision to withdraw from this vital region? While al-Saud outlines Britain’s domestic economic and political problems as the background to its withdrawal decision, he fails to do the same when it comes to discussing the Saudi position vis-à-vis Iran and its territorial claims.

One can argue that King Faisal’s main preoccupation at the time was to confront the rising challenge of pan-Arab ideologies and leftist groups, not only in the Arabian Peninsula as a whole (for example, in Yemen) but also inside Saudi Arabia itself. Faisal was not to be bothered by the seizure of two islands in the Persian Gulf while dealing with more urgent issues at home (to mention one, a discovered coup plot by a group of the most trusted and close Saudi personalities). Moreover, the “loss” of two almost uninhabited islands may not have been high on the Saudi agenda after the loss of more significant Arab territories to Israel in the 1967 war and the political consequences of that defeat for all Arab regimes, including Saudi Arabia. But the narrow focus of the book prevents the author from placing the British withdrawal within the wider regional context.

A second thesis in the book, namely, that a power vacuum resulted from the sudden British withdrawal, is also problematic. The author maintains that the United States was not ready to move in, and he intimates that perhaps it should have done in order to replace the dismantled British regional security structure. This is a clear reflection of the official thinking in Riyadh, especially among the ruling al-Saud family, which believes that the Persian Gulf needs to be secured by a superpower—a view it held in the 1970s and still adheres to today, and which has already created the grounds for serious future upheavals in the region. The author does not consider (even as an academic exercise) the possibility or desirability of any of the Gulf players, from Kuwait to Oman, let alone his own country, Saudi Arabia, regaining their lost sovereignty and defending their own territorial integrity, national interests and oil fields.

The idea of a “power vacuum” is controversial, and very much depends on the meaning and manifestations of the alleged vacuum. If it is meant to imply simply an “absence of foreign troops on the ground”, then the Persian Gulf did experience such a vacuum immediately after the British departure. But one is tempted to ask whether the Saudi–US oil deal of 1933, Ibn Saud’s famous meeting with President Harry Truman immediately after the Second World War, and the contemporaneous establishment of US rights to use Dhahran air base, were all signs of a vacuum being filled by the new superpower even before Britain announced its famous decision to draw the curtain on the final phase of its empire. Put differently, was not the alleged and short-lived pax Iranica under the Shah nothing but the beginning of the consolidation of a pax Americana by proxy?

Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf should be read as an example of Saudi official “scholarship” that seeks to provide scientific and objective support for foreign policies that have been criticised and exposed by serious international relations scholars and political scientists. It seems that the author’s research was also restricted by those who controlled access to data and archive material relating to the period under study. He says that official archives in Iran and other Persian Gulf states have not been declassified, with the exception of those of the Royal Court of Saudi Arabia and the government of Ras al-Khaymah in the United Arab Emirates, where he obtained permission to conduct research.