W. Taylor Fain III
Assistant Professor, Miller Center of Public Affairs
University of Virginia
"Toll-Gates and Barbicans of Empire: The United States, Great Britain and the Persian Gulf Region in the 20th Century"

W. Taylor Fain III: During the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, I was working at the State Department in Washington in the Office of the Historian. During the Gulf Crisis we were preparing all sorts of background studies for policy makers on the history of the region and it’s governments and on the way the United States had dealt with those governments in the recent past. And the topic was really fascinating, I found.

And I found myself asking many more questions about the subject. How long had the west been involved in the Gulf? How had it fallen to the United States to assume it’s current responsibilities in the region? And more to the point, when and how did the US government begin to play a large scale, direct military and political role in the Gulf? And when I returned to graduate school to pursue my doctorate, I decided to devote my attention to these questions. And the more I looked at the issues, the more I realized that I would have to come to terms with the legacy of British involvement in the Gulf.

Britain had been, after all, the dominant western power in the Persian Gulf region since the early 19th century. And for several years I have scoured the archives in the United States and in Britain going through state department and national security council records, the records of the defense department and the intelligence community as well as British foreign office records and colonial office documents. And the records of the office of the prime minister and the various British cabinet committees that dealt with Persian Gulf affairs.

And what I found was this. You can’t really explain the United State’s current role in the Gulf region without understanding the ways the United States attempted to cope with the steady erosion of British power and influence in the area. After the late 1960s, the United States was no longer able to subsidize Britain’s continued presence and role in the region or to establish viable surrogates for British power in the Gulf, which could act as pillars for pro-western stability in the area.

Some background here. In December 1907, Lord George Nathaniel Curzan who had been the Viceroy of British India in the years around the beginning of the 20th Century gave an address to the Midland’s Institute at the town hall of Birmingham, England. Now, Curzan had been…was a fervent believer in Britain’s imperial mission. And he had been one of the most important of the pro-councils of the British Empire in Asia. And Curzan spoke to his audience that evening about what he called the true imperialism which was this morally driven, economically enriching, politically adventurous enterprise that he thought was indispensable to British greatness at the time. And in the course of his speech, Curzan evoked for his audience an unimaginable future when India which was the principal well spring of British imperial wealth and greatness at least in the minds of most Britons would achieve it’s independence. And he asked his audience…he said when India is gone, and the great colonies have gone, do you suppose we can stop there? Your ports and your coaling stations, your fortresses and dockyards, your crown colonies and protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary as the tollgates and barbicans of an empire that has vanished or they will be taken by an enemy more powerful than yourselves. Well what were these tollgates and barbicans of the British Empire about which Curzan spoke? Barbican, by the way, is just sort of a ten-dollar word for a fortification.

Well Curzan had in mind most importantly this assortment of ports and strategic waterways of client states and military installations that extended between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Seas. And that sat astride Britain’s route to South Asia from the colony of Abadan in southwestern Arabia to Muscat and Strait of Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. And on to the protected Emirate of Kuwait at the Gulf’s northern end. The British governments in London and in Bombay had through cajolery and intimidation and force and very subtle statesmanship on occasion built this surprisingly stable diplomatic edifice from which to defend their Asian possessions.
And Curzan himself was very familiar with this region. As a young man he traveled extensively in the Gulf and in Persia. And he had written extensively about it’s value to British strategy in Asia. And as Viceroy in the late 1890s, he had worked to consolidate British power and influence there. And Curzan better than anybody understood this gradual process during the 19th century by which Britain had become the dominant power, the defender of the guarantor of the peace in the Persian Gulf region.

Britain had actually been involved in the Persian Gulf since the 18th Century. The British East India Company had built trading outposts in Basra and Bandar Bas and Pushier in what are present day Iran. But it wasn’t until the early 19th century that Britain became involved politically and militarily in the Gulf in a sustained way. And British interest in the Gulf really evolved steadily through the early 20th century. The Royal Navy acted first in the region to end the depredations against Indian shipping in Gulf water by Arab tribesman they called pirates. And over the years, through the decades of the 19th century, the British government worked to subdue and to pacify the region as an asset in the great game, as it was called, for influence in central and southwest Asia…between London and St. Petersburg. And finally by the early 20th century, Britain came to value the Gulf for it’s petroleum resources. These were becoming more and more important to British industry and to the Royal Navy.

US involvement in the Gulf much more recent phenomenon. American contacts with the region had been pretty limited. They had been intermittent. In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century American merchant vessels had touched in the region’s ports, especially the great coffee ports in modern day Yemen. The port of Mocha. American missionaries had built schools, hospitals in many of the Gulf emirates in the 19th century. But it really wasn’t until the early 1930s that the United States became involved in a major way in Gulf affairs.

In 1933, the Standard Oil Company of California which today is Chevron, won a concession from King Abdulaziz Ibn Zaiud who is the monarch of the newly established kingdom of Saudi Arabia to prospect for oil in the kingdom. Now, Abdulaziz was a political client of the British government and London had helped carve out the new territory, the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia from the former Ottoman territories in Arabia. But after Saudi oil came online in the late 1930s and after the Second World War began, the United States government worked actively to supplant Britain as Saudi Arabia’s most important foreign patron.

American officials began to appreciate just how critically important Saudi oil was going to be to prosecuting the war against the axis powers. And they understood that it would be crucial to rebuilding Europe and Asia after the war. And in waging cold war against the Soviet Union. And US officials worked in close partnership with the executives of the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) to protect and extend American influence and American concessions in the kingdom.

Well, naturally many Britons were deeply upset by American behavior in Saudi Arabia. Particularly mid-level British foreign office officials, British diplomats on the ground in the Gulf region. But at the highest levels of the British government in Downing Street, in Whitehall, there were people who recognized that Britain was going to be greatly weakened by the war and that it was going to be necessary to enlist the United States help to secure western and British interests in the region. The trick was going to be to involve the United States in the Persian Gulf and in Arabian affairs in such a way that American power could be brought to bear on behalf of British interests. The Americans had to be managed in such a way that they wouldn’t further challenge Britain’s position in the Gulf but would instead bolster it.

Now, just how to accomplish this preoccupied British policy makers for many decades. Eventually by the 1950s in the wake of the Suez crisis, the British articulated what they call their interdependence strategy. It basically…what this meant was that British would try to make themselves indispensable to the United States in places like the Persian Gulf and in Arabia. They would work to convince the United States that because they had so much experience in the area and knew so much about local dynastic politics and economics and ethnography and culture that they were going to be extremely valuable to the United States in managing western policy in the region. And in this way they would gain access to American decision making process where Middle East policy was concerned and then they could work to influence this policy and move it in directions that helped serve British interests. And this was a strategy that the British government followed through the late 1960s. All during the Cold War, British officials worked to convince their American allies that Anglo-American interests in the Persian Gulf and Arabia were perfectly consistent. And that they were identical in many cases.

In fact, though, Washington and London’s long-term interests were parallel for the most part but they were never identical. And consequently US and British perceptions of threats to those interests in the region diverged. Policy makers in Washington and London designed conflicting policies to serve their different priorities in the region and Anglo-American cooperation in the Gulf often suffered.
For the United States, securing the flow of inexpensive Gulf oil and protecting the Gulf States was an important element in their larger strategy of containing Soviet power and influence. The Persian Gulf oil wasn’t the only reason…wasn’t the only element in this containment strategy. Western military facilities in the Persian Gulf and in the Middle East were also critically important Cold War assets. Joint war plans were drafted in the late 1940s that outlined how Middle Eastern bases could be used in the case of a third world war. The enormous British military base complex in the Suez Canal zone, for existence, played a very important role in plans for a sustained strategic bombing campaign against the Soviet Union. Attacking from the south if the Cold War turned hot.

And similarly the big American airfield in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province would be used for the same purpose while British airfields in Iraq…Sheba and Habania…would be used to defend the Gulf oilfields from Soviet attack.

Strategists in London also recognized that the Gulf oil and Gulf military facilities were going to play an important role in the west cold war strategy. But for Britain, the Gulf region was important for other reasons as well. Gulf oil literally fueled and lubricated the British economy and military. But it was also critical to Britain economically for other reasons. The money that was earned by British oil firms from the sale of Gulf oil was critically important in the 1950s and early 1960s to Britain’s balance of payments. And oil money that was earned by Britain’s client regimes in the Persian Gulf was invested in British sterling, invested through British financial institutions and it became critical to the solvency of those bodies.

But the Gulf region was also important for Britain for other political reasons. And these again weren’t always the same as the political reasons that made the region important to Washington. For example, Britain’s possessions and client states in the Gulf and Arabia helped protect London’s lines of communication and supply that stretched from Europe through the Indian Ocean to Australia and Southeast Asia. Even after India gained it’s independence in 1947, Britain still needed to protect it’s interests in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Auckland and Sidney. Britain’s influence in the Gulf region gave it political influence that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Britain would be taken more seriously, be given more respect because it has these far-flung interests and responsibilities and commitments. It would be seen as a consequential player in the world stage. And perhaps most importantly, Britain’s involvement in the Persian Gulf would give it influence in Washington. It’s position of one of the guardians of the oil emirates. It would help it to implement the strategy of interdependence which it was formulating. And it would help it to move American power and influence behind British interests.

And as Britain’s resources and it’s political stature shrank during the Cold War, it clung more tenaciously than ever to it’s position in the Persian Gulf. Even when it lost it’s voice in Saudi Arabia in the early 1940s and predominance in Iran in the early 1950s, and in Egypt in the mid 1950s and in Iraq after the 1958 revolution in that country, British governments worked continuously to shore up their position in the tiny Gulf emirates along the Gulf coast.

But at the same time, Britain was doing something else. It was working to consolidate it’s position in it’s colony of Aden, in southwestern Arabia. On the other side of the Arabian Peninsula from the Gulf. Aden contained some very important air and naval facilities and Britain worked very hard to tie those facilities to it’s military requirements in the Gulf itself. And they worked to secure their system of client states that extended around the southern Arabian periphery between Aden and the Gulf states in order to protect what they called their oil communications.

By the end of the 1950s, British interests in the Persian Gulf and in southern Arabia were bound up together very tightly. They were inextricably interwoven and one foreign office official noted in the late 1950s that London’s client states were what he called, links in a chain. The effectiveness of which would be destroyed if any of those links were broken.

Well how did Washington respond to Britain’s position in the Gulf and in Arabia? Well American officials were sort of ambivalent about Britain’s role in the region. They recognized that Britain had an important role to play there. America’s resources were great but they weren’t infinite. And Britain would need to play an important role in helping prevent the encroachment of Soviet power on the Gulf and in the Middle East. The United States needed kind of a workable allied division of labor for the defense of areas important to the west in the Cold War.

But at the same time, the American’s worried that Britain’s history in the region as an imperial power, as a colonial power was going to be a liability to the west. It would likely antagonize local nationalists who were prone to be anti-western anyway and who might make common cause with the Soviet Union and with soviet efforts to undermine the west’s position in the Middle East. But despite the continued opinion of many British diplomats in the Gulf and many mid-level British foreign office officials, the United States never worked actively to push Britain out of the Middle East, out of the Gulf region or to supplant it’s influence there at least after the Saudi Arabia incident during the Second World War.

Instead, the United States worked to keep the British actively engaged in the Gulf and they helped to subsidize it’s presence there both economically and politically. And this became especially important to the United States during the 1960s as the Vietnam War raged and the conflict in Southeast Asia ate up American blood and treasure and American political capital. But the 1960s was also a period of great political upheaval and economic difficulty in Britain as well. The British national economy was in a state of perpetual crisis in the 1960s. The pound was in free fall. Politically the whole idea of maintaining Britain’s remaining imperial commitments overseas was increasingly unpopular. It was coming to being seen as morally repugnant as well as just too expensive. And the Labor government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson was looking for ways to curtail London’s economic and political and military commitments abroad. By the end of 1968, Wilson decided that Britain was going to have to withdraw it’s military forces from the Persian Gulf and give the Arab emirates in the Gulf their complete independence.

The British foreign secretary, George Brown, had the unenviable task of traveling to Washington and informing the Johnson Administration of British intentions in the Gulf. On January 11th in the morning he had a meeting at the State Department with Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. Now Dean Rusk had a reputation as being very courtly man. He was not a person who was prone to outbursts at foreign diplomats, foreign envoys. But in January that morning, 1968, Rusk was furious. And the State Department memorandum of that conversation is just fascinating document. And the British memorandum of that conversation is only recently become available and it is equally fascinating. Well Rusk basically bellowed at George Brown. He told him outright, he said, be British.

He said, Britain needed to act like a great power. It needed to act like it had in the past at least. He said that he was profoundly dismayed at London’s retreat to what he called a little England position. He said he was disturbed when the teacher left the field. And Rusk argued that because of the continuing American debacle in Vietnam, that isolationist sentiment was re-emerging in the United States and there was this growing feeling among many Americans that the United States was being left to assume the burden of free world defense by itself. And if Britain continued down this path of deliberate withdraw from world affairs, it was going to be, in Rusk’s words, a catastrophic loss for human society. Rusk said he detected in Brown’s presentation to him that morning the acrid scent of a fait accompli. He was not happy. And Brown received similar tongue-lashings from the American secretary of defense, Robert McNamara and from the President’s National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow before he retreated to the British Embassy and composed a cable back to Whitehall about his experience that morning.

Brown was sort of a character himself. He was from a working class background. He was not one to mince words. And he began his cable to Prime Minister Wilson that morning with the words, I had a bloody unpleasant meeting in Washington this morning with Rusk.
What was the United States going to do in the wake of the Wilson’s government decision to withdraw from the Gulf? Well, at first there was a great deal of anger. A great deal of confusion in Washington. But then US officials got themselves together fairly quickly. And national security adviser, Walt Rostow wrote a memorandum to President Johnson the following week after his meeting with Brown in which he quoted from the American Labor Organizer, Joe Hill. And the subject line in his memorandum was don’t mourn, organize. And that is exactly what American policy makers attempted to do.

They encouraged the small states of the Gulf to cooperate with one another. And to organize themselves into sort of a political confederacy. And the United States gave sort of tentative support to a new organization, new body called the Federation of Arab Emirates, which consisted of the nine tiny Arab Gulf states of the southern and central Gulf. The federation was very short lived. It wasn’t a success. But it did pave the way for the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971 and the establishment of independent states in Bahrain and Katar. But more importantly the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration worked to establish a cooperative relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the Gulf region. And together they thought these two countries were going to be able to act as what they called twin pillars of a new stable, pro-western, political and military order in the Gulf. Together they could serve as proxies for British power and this would relieve the United States of the necessity to assume Britain’s mantel in the region itself.

Well in Tehran, the Shaw couldn’t have been happier about this. He had been trying for years to make Iran the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. But the British government was very dubious about the Shaw’s aims and intentions in the region and about the Shaw’s motives and sincerity in defending the interests of the tiny Arab emirates on the southern and western shore of the Gulf. And in any case, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and imperial Iran were not natural candidates to form a cooperative relationship with one another. They were in fact, historic rivals for influence in the region.

Iran was much more powerful than Saudi Arabia militarily. And as the US Ambassador in Tehran during the 1960s, late 1960s Armen Myer reported regularly to Washington, the cultured Persians sort of looked down their noses at the Arabs on the other side of the Gulf. Besides, he wrote in one cable, there was the inevitability of heirs falling out when they try to divide a lucrative inheritance.

So American efforts to promote Saudi-Iranian cooperation and to establish Riyadh and Tehran as the new axis around which these twin pillars could be built, failed. Cooperation between these two neighboring countries just wasn’t forthcoming and in 1978, 1979, the imperial Iranian government was swept away by the revolution. The United States had to acknowledge that it’s efforts to find surrogates for British power and influence in the Persian Gulf region had been unsuccessful.

And following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, which seemed to place the Persian Gulf oil fields in danger, President Carter put the United States on the road to direct military involvement in the region by announcing in his 1980 state of the union message, that any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault of the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by the use of any means necessary, including military force. And a decade later, President George H. W. Bush committed the United States to war to prevent an unfriendly indigenous power from establishing dominance in the Gulf. And now a dozen years on, we stand on the brink of another such war to secure the tollgates and barbicans of American interests in the Middle East. Thank you very much.