The End of Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf, 1968-1971

Brandon Friedman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030561819
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030561826
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

This book examines how the rulers in the Persian Gulf responded to the British announcement of military withdrawal from the Gulf in 1968, ending 150 years of military supremacy in the region. The British system in the Gulf was accepted for more than a century not merely because the British were the dominant military power in the region. The balance of power mattered, but so did the framework within which the British exercised their power. The search for a new political framework, which began when the British announced withdrawal, was not simply a matter of which ruler would amass enough military power to fill the void left by the British: it was also a matter of the Gulf rulers – chiefly Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the ruling shaykhs of the lower Gulf – coming to a shared understanding of when and how the exercise of power would be viewed as legitimate. This book explores what shaped the rulers' ideas and actions in the region as the British system came toan end, providing a much-needed political history of the region in the lead-up to the independence of the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar in 1971. 

© The Author(s) 2020

B. FriedmanThe End of Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf, 1968-1971https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56182-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Brandon Friedman¹

(1)

The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies (MDC), Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

Keywords

IranSaudi ArabiaPersian GulfBritish EmpireEmirates

End Abstract

This book is organized around one simple question: how did the rulers (hukām, singular: hakīm) along the Persian Gulf¹ littoral respond to the British decision to withdraw their military from the region in 1968? The British ended 150 years of military supremacy in the Gulf between 1968 and 1971;² this is a history of the rulers’ competition for power and prestige during those four years. More specifically, this book argues against the claim that “Pax Britannica gave way to Pax Iranica” in the Gulf.³ This work challenges the argument that the post-British vacuum was filled by Iranian primacy. There was no legitimate successor to the British in Gulf and its withdrawal led to an increasingly destabilizing rivalry between Iran and Iraq.

While the Nixon Doctrine supported Iranian primacy as a proxy for U.S. power in the Gulf, Iran’s pretension of filling the vacuum and replacing the British at the end of 1971 was not accepted by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or the Arab rulers of the lower Gulf emirates. The U.S., during the last year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, adopted a British-inspired policy that became popularly known as a “twin pillars” policy in the region, which meant leaning on a condominium of Iranian and Saudi power to safeguard U.S. interests in the Gulf.⁴ During the first two years of the Nixon administration, this policy remained in place. In practice, the U.S. under President Richard Nixon viewed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as a “safe bet,” and Saudi Arabia as a “long-term liability,”⁵ when it came to protecting U.S. interests in the Gulf. However, it was not until November 7, 1970, that official U.S. policy began to tilt towards promoting Iranian primacy in the Gulf.⁶ Nevertheless, just because “the United States embraced Iran as the paramount power in the Gulf after the British completed their withdrawal in 1971,”⁷ it did not mean that the rulers in the Gulf viewed it as a legitimate arrangement.

The British system was accepted for more than a century in the Gulf not merely because the British were the dominant military power in the region. The balance of power mattered, but so did the framework within which the British exercised their power. The British were viewed as legitimate arbiters of regional security because, on the whole, they avoided interfering in how the rulers exercised their local authority. The search for a new framework for regional politics was not simply a matter of which ruler would amass enough military power to fill the void left by the British, it was also a matter of the rulers coming to a shared understanding of when and how the exercise of power would be viewed as legitimate. This book is the story of how and what shaped the rulers’ ideas and actions about what constituted the legitimate exercise of power in the absence of a British system that separated the Iranian and Arab sides of the Gulf from one another. Some might argue that little happened between 1968 and 1971. However, an overemphasis on events runs the risk of overlooking crucial changes in beliefs, ideas, and interactions between the primary actors in history and how those beliefs in turn shaped the system in which they acted.

In the aftermath of the Baʿth revolution in Iraq in July 1968, the decade-long regional rivalry between Iran and Iraq rapidly escalated. This rivalry pitted Imperial Iranian nationalism against Iraq’s revolutionary Arab nationalism, creating a cycle of mutually reinforcing hostility. The narrative presented here shows how Saudi Arabia and the ruling shaykhs of the lower Gulf attempted to navigate the intensifying rivalry between Iranian nationalism and revolutionary Arab nationalism, particularly after the death of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970.

In a narrow sense, then, this monograph focuses on how the rulers viewed and pursued their respective interests—security, power, wealth, honor, and prestige—in order to preserve and protect their dynastic regimes. Yet, the core argument in this book is that political relationships between the rulers in the Gulf, on both sides, Arab and Iranian, were tightly interconnected.⁸ The book will describe these interconnections and explain the effects of British withdrawal on them.

Shaykhly Authority

During most of the nineteenth century and more than half of the twentieth century, Great Britain was the “arbiter and guardian of the Gulf.”⁹ From the perspectives of the ruling Arab shaykhs, by accepting this “culturally sanctioned” role as arbiter and protector, the British Resident was the Gulf’s paramount ruler in the shaykhly system of authority and known as Chief of the Gulf (raʾis al-khalij).¹⁰ The British referred to this arrangement as the “Trucial system,” in reference to the series of treaty arrangements that Great Britain entered into with the various ruling shaykhs in the Gulf between 1835 and 1916.

In the nineteenth century, the British transformed the Gulf into a “British lake” by entering into a series of treaties with the ruling shaykhs of the Arab littoral that were meant to pacify Gulf waters for the safe passage of British merchant vessels. The British intended to end the tribal warfare and sea-raiding that had erupted in Gulf waters and threatened the security of British trade in the early nineteenth century. In 1820, the ruling shaykhs of the Omani coast (what is the present-day United Arab Emirates ) signed a peace agreement with the British. Bahrain asked to be admitted to the treaty in order to avoid paying maritime tolls.¹¹ At that time the British considered Qatar to be a Bahraini dependency and Kuwait under Ottoman suzerainty and so they were not included in the treaty. In 1835 the ruling shaykhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, and the Qasimi Empire¹² and the British upgraded the 1820 treaty to a “Maritime Truce,” made perpetual in 1853 (Bahrain joined in 1861), which outlawed warfare at sea in the Gulf and made Great Britain the ultimate arbiter of disputes in the Gulf. The British began to refer to these shaykhdoms as the “Trucial States” and to the Omani coast as the “Trucial Coast.” In 1892, the ruling shaykhs entered into a new agreement with the British government which constituted the basis for Britain’s special relationship with the Arab rulers in the Gulf until 1971.¹³

The shaykhs, in exchange for protection from external threats, agreed not to have relations with, or cede territory to, any outside power other than Great Britain. The British interpreted these agreements as mandates for control over the shaykhdoms’ external affairs.¹⁴ Bahrain signed such an agreement in 1880, and the Shaykh of Kuwait signed a similar agreement in 1899 (which was terminated in 1961 with Kuwaiti independence). In 1916, Qatar’s independence from Bahrain was acknowledged by the British and the Shaykh of Qatar entered into an exclusive agreement with Britain.

While these treaties provided Britain exclusivity and safety in the Gulf, they also guaranteed the shaykhs an important source of their authority and legitimacy, providing them with a perpetual means to fulfill two of their principal obligations to their peoples—maintaining order and providing protection from external threats. And what is important for the purposes of this study is that British protection made the shaykhs’ authority much less frail than in the past. The ruling shaykhs used British protection as an extension of their own power.

During the nineteenth century, the shaykhs and their families transformed themselves into the established vehicle through which the British protection from external threats was implemented. In most cases this relationship with the British enhanced the status of the ruling families and as a result they became less vulnerable to internal threats with the exception of intrafamilial challenges.¹⁵

Therefore, by virtue of the British treaties, Al Nahyan of the Al Bu Falah clan cemented the supremacy established by Zayid bin Khalifah (1855–1909) in Abu Dhabi, while their cousins and bitter rivals, the Al Maktum of the Al Bu Falasah used British protection to establish a lucrative transit trade in Dubai which traversed the Gulf and Indian Ocean. Shaykh Mubarak Al Sabah of Kuwait used the treaty with the British to outmaneuver an Ottoman bid for control of Kuwait’s strategic port, as well as to cement Al Sabah ascendancy over the other prominent merchant families of Kuwait. The Al Thani of Qatar, caught between the Al Khalifah of Bahrain and Ottoman suzerainty at the beginning of the twentieth century, was able to parlay British recognition into independent power.¹⁶

The treaties ironically also protected the rapidly deteriorating fortunes of the Al Qawasim in Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah. After all, it was the Al Qawasim sea-raids (gharat ) of merchant ships in the Gulf that prompted the British to put an end to what they deemed piracy (qarsana ).¹⁷ In 1819–1820 the British launched a full-scale naval expedition from Bombay that wiped out hundreds of Qasimi vessels along 322 kilometers (200 miles) of the littoral, which the British had named the “Pirate Coast.” While the British gunboats and subsequent treaties ended a profitable maritime raiding enterprise for the Qasimi shaykhs of Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, leading to their decline, the British guarantee of protection also prevented the Qasimi rulers from being absorbed by larger, more powerful neighbors in Abu Dhabi, Muscat, and Oman.

The British relationship with the ruling shaykhs, until the announcement of withdrawal, eliminated threats to British maritime interests in the Gulf; provided a form of protection and power to the existing ruling shaykhs; and limited the expansion of both Iran into the Gulf waters and the Al Saʿud conquests from the Arabian interior to the Gulf coast. As James Onley outlined, the British were socialized to function as the paramount shaykh in a shaykhly system,¹⁸ and, in 1968, it was not clear how the system of shaykhly sovereignty would survive without...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The End of Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf
• 3. One Step Forward, One Step Back
• 4. Iran: The British Successor in the Gulf?
• 5. Nixon, the Shah, and King Faysal
• 6. Iran Shifting Gears
• 7. From Crisis to Clarity
• 8. A Sea Change in the Middle East and the Gulf
• 9. Grandeur and Independence
• 10. Conclusion
• Back Matter