British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.

pressing
for negotiations with Iran, and getting involved. E. A.
Berthoud of the Foreign Office Eastern Department minuted that Dr.
Musaddiq’s removal was Britain’s number one objective, and action
should be taken accordingly. Britain and Iran drifted into a state
of near war.

The fact that a vital
British interest in the Persian Gulf had been
successfully expropriated, and the fact that the British had not
used, or seriously threatened the use of, force in its defence,
underlined, as nothing else could have done, the change which had
taken place in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the
littoral states of the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf was no longer
under British influence; British hegemony had been successfully
defied. Barely ten years earlier, the British had been able to
overturn a government easily, for example in Iraq, because the
government of that country was pursuing policies inconvenient to the
British war effort. Now the case was different. A new world order
had emerged: the creation of the United Nations, the necessity for
avoiding giving offence to the United States, the necessity of not
giving any excuse for Russian intervention, all had narrowed the
choice of British foreign policy and options. By the second half of
1951 Britain’s economy had been under considerable pressure anyway.
The nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company added to that
pressure. The United Kingdom was purchasing more from abroad in
dollars than it was earning from exports. At the same time there was
the British rearmament programme going on. In August of 1951, the
British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, gave as
estimation of an expected deficit of $1200 million, which was a
record level by standards of the time. Now, in the short-term
Britain was also forced to seek more expensive alternative supplies,
replacing the Iranian oil.

There seemed to be only one
remedy. Gaitskell flew off to

Washington to seek American
help. The cost of defying

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177