Abstract
On December 11, 1907, George Nathaniel Curzon, the former viceroy of India, addressed the Midland Institute at the Town Hall in Birmingham, England. A fervent believer in Britain’s imperial “mission,” and one of the most important proconsuls of the British Empire in Asia, Curzon declaimed to his audience upon the “true imperialism”—the morally driven, economically enriching, and politically adventurous enterprise he believed indispensable to British greatness at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the course of his address, he evoked for his audience an unimaginable future when India, the principal wellspring of imperial wealth and prestige in the British popular imagination, would achieve its independence. “When India has gone and the great Colonies have gone,” he asked, “do you suppose we can stop there? Your ports and coaling stations, your fortresses and dockyards, your Crown Colonies and protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary as the toll-gates and barbicans of an empire that has vanished, or they will be taken by an enemy more powerful than yourselves.”1
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Notes
George Nathaniel Curzon, “The True Imperialism,” The Nineteenth Century and After, a Monthly Review, Vol. 58 (January–June 1908): 152–65.
The most useful works on the British ascendancy in the Gulf region include Robert J. Blyth, “Britain versus India in the Persian Gulf: The Struggle for Political Control, c. 1928–48,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Affairs 28, no. 1 (January 2000): 90–111; J. B. Kelly, “The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf,” St. Antony’s Papers, no. 4, Middle Eastern Affairs, no. 1 (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1958); J. B. Kelly, “Great Game or Grand Illusion,” Survey: A Journal of East & West Studies 25, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 109–27; Halford L. Hoskins, “Background of the British Position in Arabia,” Middle East Journal 1, no. 2 (April 1947): 137–47; Herbert F. Liebesny, “International Relations of Arabia: The Dependent Areas,” Middle East Journal 1, no. 2 (April 1947): 148–68; J. F. Standish, “British Maritime Policy in the Persian Gulf,” Middle Eastern Studies 3, no. 4 (July 1967): 324–54.
The best single source on Aden in this period remains R. J. Gavin, Aden under British Rule, 1839–1967 (London: C. Hurst, 1975), pp. 1–130. 4. Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and Its Invaders (London: Harper Collins, 1996), pp. 355–57; Kelly, “Legal and Historical Basis,” pp. 127–28.
See David Fromkin, “The Great Game in Asia,” Foreign Affairs 58, no. 4 (Spring 1980): 934–51; David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), pp. 26–32; Edward Ingram, The Beginnings of the Great Game in Asia, 1828–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992); Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999).
Miriam Joyce, Kuwait 1945–1996: An Anglo-American Perspective (London: Frank Cass, 1998), pp. ix–xii; Kelly, “Legal and Historical Basis,” pp. 135–36.
C. U. Aitchison, A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, 5th. Edn., 14 volumes (Calcutta: 1929), vol. 11, pp. 317–18, quoted in Kelly, “The British Position in the Persian Gulf,” p. 134; Gavin, Aden under British Rule, pp. 131–55.
G. S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 89.
“Treaty Relationships with Persian Gulf States,” Department of State Memorandum from the Office of the Legal Advisor to the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, 9 February 1968, Secret, Department of State Central Files (hereafter DOSCF), POL 33 PERSIAN GULF; “The Arab Shaikhdoms of the Persian Gulf,” Foreign Office Memorandum by B. A. B. Burrows, Eastern Department, 6 June 1949, FO 371/74960; Liebesny, “International Relations of Arabia,” pp. 156–58; Bernard Burrows, Footnotes in the Sand: The Gulf in Transition, 1953–1958 (London: Michael Russell, 1990), pp. 9–27.
Blyth, “Britain versus India,” pp. 105–06; Burrows, Footnotes in the Sand, p. 17.
Liebesny, “International Relations of Arabia,” pp. 150–56; Smith, “Rulers and Residents,” p. 509.
Liebesny, “International Relations of Arabia,” pp. 162–64.
The best sources on early American contacts with the Middle East and Persian Gulf include John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963); James A. Field, America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969); Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York: Free Press, 1993); Joseph J. Malone, “America and the Arabian Peninsula: The First Two Hundred Years,” Middle East Journal 30, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 406–24; Michael A. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf A History of America’s Expanding Role in the Persian Gulf, 1833–1992 (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pp. 3–5; Malone, “America and the Arabian Peninsula,” pp. 409–11, Hall, Empires of the Monsoon, pp. 397–400.
Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, p. 6.
American interests in the Gulf region were not exclusively commercial in the early years of U.S. involvement there. They were philanthropic and missionary as well. The Arabian Mission, established at New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1889, established missions, schools and hospitals in Amara and Basra in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, vol. 7 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–48), pp. 466, 469–73; Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, p. 7; Malone, “America in the Arabian Peninsula,” pp. 411–12.
For early British efforts to exploit Persian Gulf oil, see Marian Kent, Moguls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East in British Foreign Policy, 1900–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Benjamin Shwadran, The Middle East, Oil, and the Great Powers (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955); Fiona Venn, Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1986); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 134–302.
“Policy and Information Statement on Arab Principalities of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” 15 March 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1946, 7:65.
William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 108–137; Michael J. Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), pp. 178–85.
American efforts to exploit Persian Gulf oil are examined in Anderson, Aramco, the United States, and Saudi Arabia: A Study in the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of ARAMCO and the Saudi Kings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Aaron David Miller, Search for Security: Saudi Arabian Oil and American Foreign Policy, 1939–1949 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); David S. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Yergin, Prize, pp. 165–280.
In exchange for the concession, Casoc agreed to pay the royal government “an initial cash advance of £50,000 and an annual rental of £5,000 until oil was discovered, a further cash advance of £100,000 after discovery, and royalties at the rate of four shillings per ton. The government agreed to forego its right to tax the company, and the company agreed ‘as far as practical’ to employ Saudi nationals and to refrain from interference in the internal affairs of the country.” Anderson, ARAMCO, p. 25.
By 1938 Dammam produced oil in commercial quantities, and Casoc refined the crude at a new facility constructed by SOCAL to serve its oil interests in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. But production was only half the oil battle in Saudi Arabia.
Miller, Search for Security, p. 24.
For American diplomacy in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region during the Second World War, see Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 36–49; Thomas W. Lippman, Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004), pp. 25–27, 97–100; Parker Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States: Birth of a Security Partnership (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 13–50; Benson Lee Grayson, Saudi American Relations (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 25–64; David E. Long, The United States and Saudi Arabia: Ambivalent Allies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), pp. 101–06; Barry Rubin, “Anglo-American Relations in Saudi Arabia, 1941–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 2 (April 1979): 253–68; Michael B. Stoff, Oil, War, and American Security: The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941–1947 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Anderson, ARAMCO, pp. 35–123; Miller, Search for Security, pp. 32–149, Painter, Oil and the American Century, pp. 32–95; Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pp. 20–39.
Department of State Telegram 1327, Cairo to Washington, 27 July 1943, FRUS, 1943, 3:935–37.
More than 80 percent of the petroleum used by the Allied Powers in their war against Germany and Japan came from American wells, but Aramco production of Saudi oil nearly quintupled during the war years, going from 12,000 barrels per day to 59,000 barrels per day. In addition, the company constructed a new oil refinery at Ras Tanura capable of handling 50,000 barrels daily. On January 31, 1944, Casoc formally changed its name to the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco); see FRUS, 1944, 4:12; Roy Lebkicher, ARAMCO and World Oil: Handbook for American Employees (New York: Arabian American Oil Company, 1952), p. 77; “The Secretary of State to the Minister Resident in Saudi Arabia (Moose),” 9 October 1943, FRUS, 1943, 4:938–39.
Draft Memorandum to President Truman prepared by the State Department’s Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs (Merriam), early August 1945, FRUS, 1945, 8:45–48.
“Foreign Petroleum Policy of the United States,” Memorandum by the Inter-Divisional Petroleum Committee of the Department of State, 11 April 1944, FRUS, 1944, 5:27–33. See also Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State (Clayton) to President Roosevelt, undated c. November 1944, FRUS, 1943, 5:37–38.
Quoted in Miller, Search for Security, pp. 101–102.
Michael B. Stoff, “The Anglo-American Oil Agreement and the Wartime Search for Foreign Oil Policy,” Business History Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 59–74; Miller, Search for Security, pp. 99–107; Yergin, Prize, pp. 399–403.
See T. H. Vail Motter, The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia, The United States Army in World War II, The Middle East, Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952); James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 18–20; Thomas A. Bryson, American Diplomatic Relations with the Middle East, 1784–1975: A Survey (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1977), pp. 117–20.
J. Rives Childs, Foreign Service Farewell: My Years in the Near East (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 146.
On July 29, 1944 the American Minister in Jidda raised the issue with the Saudi foreign minister. An airfield at Dhahran would shorten the route taken by U.S. air traffic between Cairo and Karachi by 212 miles and eliminate the need to stop, in transit, at British fields in Abadan and Habbaniya in Iran and Iraq. As put succinctly by James L. Gormly, “the use of Dhahran was desired to shorten the flying distance to Karachi, to provide a needed fuel stop, to permit planes to carry more supplies, and to support the growing American oil facility in the area.” James M. Gormly, “Keeping the Open Door in Saudi Arabia: The United States and the Dhahran Airfield, 1945–1946,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 193.
James F. Schnabel, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1945–1947, History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), pp. 139–49; see also Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 56–59.
Gormly, “Keeping the Open Door,” pp. 196–99.
John J. McCloy to the Department of State, 31 January 1945, quoted in Leffler, Preponderance of Power, p. 58.
Rubin, “Anglo-American Relations,” p. 253.
Ibid., p. 254.
Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States, p. 22.
John Kent, Introduction to British Documents on the End of Empire (hereafter BDEE), Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East (London: The Stationery Office, 1998), series B, vol. 1, p. xliii.
Churchill to Roosevelt, 20 February 1944 and 4 March 1944, quoted in Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 188; Rubin, “Anglo-American Relations,” p. 260.
“The Meeting of the President and the King.” The Minister in Saudi Arabia (Eddy) to the Secretary of State, 3 March 1945, FRUS, 1945, 8:8–9; Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States, p. 38; Rubin, Anglo-American Relations,” p. 255; Minute by Thomas Wikely, 30 November 1945, quoted in Louis, British Empire, p. 192.
Quoted in R. N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. xiii.
A Foreign Office memorandum of March 1944 anticipated this issue and expressed it succinctly: They [the Americans] have enormous power, but it is the power of the reservoir behind the dam, which may overflow uselessly or be run through pipes to drive turbines. The transmutation of their power into useful forms, and its direction into advantageous channels, is our concern. … It must be our purpose not to balance our power against that of America, but to make use of American power for purposes which we regard as good. … A strong American policy must therefore be based not on a determination to resist American suggestions or demands, but on an understanding of the way in which their political machinery works, and a knowledge of how to make it work to the world’s advantage—and our own. … [W]e must use the power of the United States to preserve the Commonwealth and the Empire. “Essentials of an American Policy,” 21 March 1944, FO 371/38523, reproduced in John Baylis, ed., Anglo-American Relations since 1939: An Enduring Alliance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)v, pp. 34–36.
Between 1941 and 1945, U.S. oil consumption grew from 1.49 billion barrels of oil per year to 1.77 billion. Keeping pace, U.S. production climbed from 1.4 billion barrels yearly to 1.7 billion. After the war, oil increased its share of total U.S. energy consumption from 30.5 percent in 1945 to 37.2 percent in 1950. Painter, Oil and the American Century, pp. 96–98; Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, pp. 268–69.
During the war, production of Persian Gulf oil had exploded from 12,950 metric tons per year to 25,950 metric tons as the Allies came to rely on the region’s petroleum reservoirs. That amount more than trebled to 85,925 metric tons by 1950. Aramco production in Saudi Arabia increased from 58,000 barrels per day to 547,000 barrels daily in the first five years after the war, while British concessions in Iran and Iraq increased production from 436,000 barrels per day in 1945 to 780,000 barrels per day in 1950. Ethan B. Kapstein, The Insecure Alliance: Energy Crises and World Politics Since 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 59–63; George Philip, The Political Economy of International Oil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 103–05; Georges Brondel, “The Sources of Energy, 1920–1970,” in The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Twentieth Century, Part I, ed. Carlo M. Cipolla (London: Collins/Fontana Books, 1972), pp. 242–47.
Quoted in Painter, Oil and the American Century, p. 156.
Acting Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman commented in May 1948, “The European Recovery Program was most carefully designed to relieve the present drain on American petroleum supplies and to result in most of Europe’s requirements being met from the Middle East.” Furthermore, David Painter writes, “more than 10 per cent of the total aid expended under ERP was spent on oil, more than for any other single commodity. Between April 1948 and December 1951 56 per cent of the oil supplied to the Marshall Plan countries by U.S. companies was financed by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and its successor, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA).” Miller, Search for Security, p. 178; Painter, Oil and the American Century, pp. 155–56.
“The British and American Positions,” Memorandum Prepared in the Department of State, undated, ca. October 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:513. 50. “Specific Current Questions,” Memorandum prepared in the Department of State, undated, ca. October 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:547–48. 51. Letter from President Truman to King Ibn Saud, 31 October 1951, FRUS, 1950, 5:1190–1191.
Long, United States and Saudi Arabia, pp. 34–36, 106–07; Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States, p. 58; Painter, Oil and the American Century, pp. 165–71; Yergin, Prize, pp. 445–49.
“Policy and Information Statement on Arab Principalities of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,” Memorandum Prepared in the Department of State, 15 March 1946, FRUS, 1946, 7:67–68.
“Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense by the Joint Chiefs,” 30 November 1951, JCS 1887/29, quoted in David R. Devereux, The Formulation of British Defense Policy towards the Middle East, 1948–56 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 110.
Memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, 12 October 1946, FRUS, 1946, 7:631–33. 56. Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, p. 45.
Walter Mills, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), vol. 9, pp. 2026–27, quoted in Palmer, Guardians of the Gulf, p. 43.
“Shortage of Oil Threatens Our Defense, Forrestal Says,” New York Times, 20 January 1948, pp. 1, 14.
Quoted in David Alan Rosenberg, “The U.S. Navy and the Problem of Oil in a Future War: The Outline of a Strategic Dilemma, 1945–1950, Naval War College Review 29, no. 1 (Summer 1976): 54; Michael J. Cohen, Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945–1954 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 6.
“Petroleum Crisis in Venezuela,” U.S. Army Intelligence Review, 23 May 1946, pp. 2–7, quoted in Miller, Search for Security, p. 177.
On the importance of Middle Eastern airbases to allied war fighting strategies, see Cohen, Fighting World War Three, pp. 1–61; Peter Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 53–54, 74, 95; Kenneth Condit, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, Volume II, 1947–1949, History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), pp. 153–63; “U.S. Strategic Position in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East,” 14 November 1949, FRUS, 1949, 6:58–59; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, p. 238.
Rosenberg, “U.S. Navy,” pp. 56–59. At this point, the Navy acquired allies in the State Department who feared the political repercussions among the Arab states of abandoning Gulf defense completely. A 1951 State Department memorandum asserted that “the peoples we plan to abandon in war are the same peoples we must continue to work with upon liberation and in the post-war period, when access to local resources and facilities would have to be renegotiated in an adverse atmosphere.” “Re-Evaluation of U.S. Plans for the Middle East,” Paper Prepared in the Department of State, undated, FRUS, 1951, 5:10–11.
For information on MIDEASTFOR, see Michael Palmer, On Course to Desert Storm: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1992), pp. 35–40; Peter W. DeForth, “U.S. Naval Presence in the Persian Gulf: The Mideast Force Since World War II,” Naval War College Review 28, no. 1 (Summer 1975): 28–38; Rosenberg, “Oil in a Future War,” pp. 53–64.
“Defence of the Middle East,” War Cabinet Memorandum by Mr. Eden, 13 April 1945, CAB 66/65, WP(45)256, reprinted in John Kent, ed., BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, Part I, 1945–1949, series B, vol. 4, p. 7.
“British Policy and Organisation in the Middle East,” Memorandum by Lord Altrincham, 2 September 1945, CO 732/88, no. 5a, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, p. 39.
“Imperial Security in the Middle East,” War Cabinet Memorandum by Sir E. Grigg (later Lord Altrincham), 2 July 1945, CAB 66/67, CP(45)55, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, p. 21.
“Introductory Paper on the Middle East Submitted Informally by the United Kingdom Representatives [to the Washington Talks],” undated, ca. October 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:569.
Wm. Roger Louis emphasizes the importance British strategists placed on Africa and the value of the Middle East to African defense. He writes, “In the late 1940s, Africa gradually superseded India as one of the ultimate justifications of the British Empire. The Middle East, which itself had incalculable potential in oil, was its defence. Africa, where the British Empire might be maintained indefinitely, became the mystique.” Louis, British Empire, p. 16
“Defence of the Middle East,” War Cabinet Memorandum by Mr. Eden, 13 May 1945, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, p. 8 “British Strategic Requirements in the Middle East,” Report by the COS to the Cabinet Defence Committee, 18 June 1946, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, pp. 151, 158–62.
“Strategic Implications of an Independent Libya,” Memorandum by the COS on the Position of Libya in Middle Eastern Defence Strategy, 10 November 1949, DEFE 5/18, COS(49)381, in BDEE, series B, vol. 2, p. 3.
John Kent, Introduction to BDEE, series B. vol. 4, Egypt and the Defense of the Middle East, 1945–1954, p. xxxvii.
David R. Devereux, “Britain, the Commonwealth, and the Defence of the Middle East,” pp. 330, 342, “Middle East Policy Memorandum by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,” 17 September 1945, CP(45)174, CAB 129/4.
“Future Defence Policy in the Suez Canal Area,” draft aide memoire by the Post Hostilities Planning Staff for the COS, 18 April 1945, CAB 81/46, PHP (45) 13, annex, “Imperial Security in the Middle East,” War Cabinet Memorandum by Sir E. Grigg (later Lord Altrincham), 2 July 1945.
“Middle East Policy,” COS Committee Minutes on the Washington Talks with the Americans, 21 November 1947, DEFE 4/8, COS 144(47)1.
Michael Wright, the assistant undersecretary at the Foreign Office, noted happily, “The principal result of the Washington talks is that for the first time American policy has crystalised on the line of supporting British policy. It is not the Americans who have altered our policy, but we who have secured American support for our position.” Minute of 20 January 1948, FO 371/68041, quoted in Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 3:502n88. For U.S. documentation on the 1947 Pentagon Talks, see FRUS, 1947, 5:485–626.
“Specific Current Questions,” Memorandum Prepared in the Department of State, undated, ca. October 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:535.
“Considerations in Support of Policy in Respect of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East Drawn Up After Consultation with the British Group,” Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of South Asian Affairs (Hare), 5 November 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:579.
“Staff Study ‘Intermezzo,”’ Report by the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East to the COS, 13 May 1948, DEFE 5/11, COS(48)111, BDEE, vol. 1, pp. 277–80. See, also, Cohen, Fighting World War Three, pp. 161–62.
Officials in London did not like the idea of abandoning the Gulf. The British Joint Planning Staff wrote in October 1948, “We are most reluctant to leave, completely unprotected, the whole of the Persian Gulf area, thus abandoning all the Middle East oil and presenting the enemy with a large area from which he can develop threats to our sea and air routes along the Red Sea and Southern Arabia and organise activities which may threaten our main Middle East positions. The loss of air bases in the Persian Gulf will, moreover, make any possible return to this area an operation of considerable difficulty. With the resources available to us no other course is possible. “Emergency Planning for the Defence of the Middle East,” Report by the JPS to the COS, 7 October 1948 (JP(48)106), 11 October 1948, DEFE 4/16, COS 145(48)2, annexes, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, p. 294.
“Digest of Plan ‘Speedway,”’ COS Committee Memorandum on the Global War Emergency Plan for the Period to July 1950, 16 December 1948, DEFE 5/9, COS (48)210, annex, BDEE, Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, vol. 1, pp. 299–305; Cohen, Fighting World War Three, pp. 163–73.
“Memorandum of a Conversation between the Secretary of State and Crown Prince Saud,” 17 January 1947, FRUS, 1947, 5:738–41; Department of State Telegram, Jidda to Washington, 6 April 1949, Secret, FRUS, 1949, vol. 6, pp. 1594–96; Department of State Telegram, Jidda to Washington, 17 November 1949, Top Secret, FRUS, 1949, 6:1618–1620; Department of State Telegram, Jidda to Washington, 17 November 1949, Top Secret, FRUS, 1949, 6:1620–22; Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States, pp. 45–48.
State Department Telegram, Washington to Jidda, 26 July 1947, Top Secret, FRUS, 1947, 5:752. See, also, Editorial Note, FRUS, 1949, 6:1624.
“Middle East Problems,” letter from Sir W. Smart (retired) to Sir J. Bowker on Anglo-American Relations, Egyptian Politics, and Middle East Defence. Minutes by T. E. Evans, J. de C. Hamilton, and C. B. Duke,” 11 October 1952, FO 141/1454, no. 175, in BDEE, vol. 2, pp. 467–73.
Makins’s report of his tour, found in FO 371/98343, is reprinted as Annex 2 in Bernard Burrows, Footnotes in the Sand (London: Michael Russell, 1990), pp. 157–60.
For the views of the British military on early Middle Eastern nationalism, see “Middle East Policy: Report by the JPS to the COS, 6 Nov 1945,” 9 November 1945, CAB 79/41, in BDEE, vol. 1, p. 52; “A Chain of Gibraltars,” Memorandum by General J. Glubb on the Means to Retain Britain’s Middle Eastern Position, 23 May 1951, FO 371/91223, no. 29, in BDEE, vol. 2, p. 175.
For an excellent overview of American anticolonialism and the British Empire, see Wm. Roger Louis, “American Anti-Colonialism and the Dissolution of the British Empire,” International Affairs 61, no. 3 (1985): 395–420.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson noted, “The Middle East presented a picture that might have been drawn by Karl Marx himself—with the masses a disinherited and poverty-stricken proletariat, no middle class, a small and corrupt ruling class pushed about by foreigners who sought to exploit priceless natural resources, whether oil or canal. Was there ever such an opportunity to invoke inherent xenophobia to destroy the foreigner and his system and substitute the communist solution?” Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), p. 600.
“United States Security Interests in the Eastern Mediterranean,” JCS 1641/1, 10 March 1946, quoted in Cohen, Fighting World War Three, p. 34.
The most important works on the Iran crisis of 1951–1954 include FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 10, Iran, 1951–1954; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 28, “The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953” (includes the CIA Clandestine Service History, “Overthrow of Premier Mossedeq of Iran, November 1952–August 1953,” completed in March 1954 by Dr. Donald Wilbur), www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/; Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Steve Marsh, Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil: Crisis in Iran (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Mark J. Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d’Etat in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 3 (August 1987): 261–86; May Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950–1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Mary Ann Heiss, “Real Men Don’t Wear Pajamas: Anglo-American Cultural Perceptions of Mohammed Mossadeq and the Iranian Oil Nationalization Dispute,” in Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945, ed. Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2001); James F. Goode, The United States and Iran: In the Shadow of Mussadiq (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); James A. Bill and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Mussadiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988); J. H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, Volume 2, The Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 383–523; Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran’s Oil Nationalization and its Aftermath (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992); H. W. Brands, “The Cairo-Tehran Connection in Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East, 1951–1953,” International History Review 11, no. 3 (August 1989): 434–56; Francis J. Gavin, “Politics, Power, and U.S. Policy in Iran, 1950–1953,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 56–89; Brian Lapping, End of Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 191–226; C. M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured (London: Grenada, 1982); Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
Natalia I. Yegorova, “The Iran Crisis of 1945–46: A View from the Russian Archives, Working Paper No. 15 (Washington, D.C.: The Cold War International History Project, 1996); Bill, Eagle and the Lion, pp. 31–38; Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 44–48; Leffler, Preponderance of Power, pp. 79–80.
Valued at over £120 million, the facility was Britain’s single-most expensive overseas investment. It produced 660,000 barrels of oil per day, nearly 33 percent of the Middle East’s total output, and 6 percent of the world’s total output, and provided 31 percent of Europe’s refined oil. Further, the sale of Iranian oil produced £400 million in foreign exchange for Britain annually. Abadan was a major source of aviation fuel and fuel oil for the Eastern hemisphere and produced 85 percent of the fuel oil consumed by the Royal Navy. See, Heiss, “Real Men Don’t Wear Pajamas,” p. 179, Kapstein, Insecure Alliance, p. 79, Painter, Oil and the American Century, p. 174, Leffler, Preponderance of Power, p. 422.
Quoted in Bill and Louis, Mussadiq, pp. 229–30.
For a thorough treatment of the complex relationship between AIOC, the British government and the government of Iran during these negotiations, see Steve Marsh, “HMG, AIOC, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Crisis: In Defence of Anglo-Iranian,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 12, no. 4 (December 2001): 143–74).
“Iran,” NSC 107/2, 27 June 1951, Top Secret, FRUS, 1952–1954, 10:72; Malcolm Byrne, “The Road to Intervention: Factors Influencing U.S. Policy toward Iran, 1945–1953,” chapter 6 in Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, ed. Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), pp. 201–226.
Gasiorowski, “Coup d’Etat in Iran,” pp. 262–63.
Foreign Office Telegram, Tehran to London, 19 November 1951, FO 371, EP/1024/10, quoted in Brands, “Cairo-Tehran Connection,” p. 440.
The acting foreign secretary, the Marquis of Salisbury, reiterated in August 1953, “If we give Washington the impression that we are only concerned with our oil to the exclusion of any consideration of the necessity of keeping Persia in the anticommunist camp, we may lose all control over American actions. That would be disastrous.” Memorandum by the Foreign Secretary, 5 August 1952, CAB 129/54, C(52)276, quoted in Brands, “Cairo-Tehran Connection,” pp. 449–50, Memorandum from Lord Salisbury to Prime Minister Churchill, 28 August 1953, PREM 11/276, quoted in Brands, “Cairo-Tehran Connection,” p. 454.
In fact, Mussadiq opposed the Tudeh until he was deposed, while the Tudeh suspected until the summer of 1953 that Mussadiq was an agent of the United States. Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), pp. 3–16; Sussan Siavoshi, Liberal Nationalism in Iran: The Failure of a Movement (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).
National Security Archive Briefmg Book No. 28, “The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953”; Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions: The American Experience and Iran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 55–56; Gavin, “Politics, Power and U.S. Policy,” pp. 87–89; Brands, “Cairo-Tehran Connection,” pp. 450–54; Gasiorowski, “Coup D’Etat in Iran,” pp. 271–75.
Its efforts must be counted a success, at least in the short term. As Mary Ann Heiss has concluded, “The government stabilized a friendly regime in Tehran without seriously alienating the British. The prospect of significant oil sales seemed to stave off the chances of a communist takeover in Iran; Western interests would continue to dominate Iran’s oil, thereby denying that precious resource to the Soviet Union. With Iran squarely in the Western camp, moreover, at least one door had been closed to Soviet expansion in to the oil-rich and strategically important region of the Middle East.” Heiss, Empire and Nationhood, p. 220.
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Fain, W.T. (2008). “Toll-Gates of Empire”: Britain, the United States, and the Persian Gulf Region before 1951. In: American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613362_2
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