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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

UAE exit from OPEC isn’t about oil. Iran War making Gulf states seek new shelters

Britain’s failure to secure the oil of Arabia in the 1950s was no misjudgement. The sun was setting on the Empire, and a new hegemon had emerged. Is another anarchy on the rise now?

Even mad dogs and Englishmen had hidden in the shade: Turki bin Abdullah al-Otaishan, the new Emir of Ras Tanura, had chosen the hottest month of the year, when the burning light merged sky with earth, to drive through the desert with his band of 40 armed men. The group was headed to al-Buraimi, an oasis of uncertain sovereignty in eastern Saudi Arabia, at the crossroads between the desert and the ports of the Persian Gulf. Turki threw a grand feast on the day after he arrived—31 August 1952—to mark the Eid al-Adha festival, serving camel shank, lamb, and rice to the villagers. Like a politician seeking votes, he promised a doctor, a primary school, and more feasts. Local clans, he knew, were poor and willing to be seduced.

Two weeks later, the Empire that served as protector of the Persian Gulf Emirates responded. As Royal Air Force combat jets flew low over al-Buraimi, soldiers of the Trucial Oman Levies were deployed in nearby al-Ain. The operation achieved little, with Britain’s Air Staff calling it “protracted and ineffective”; American journalists cruelly referred to the operation as a “comic-opera blockade”.

Last week, the United Arab Emirates—born from mini-states created by Imperial Britain to fight pirates in the Persian Gulf—announced it would be leaving the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and other regional bodies. The decision has been widely interpreted as driven by the UAE’s desire to pump more oil, and thus lower prices.

That is the lesser part of the truth. The Iran War is leading the Persian Gulf’s rich but weak Arab states to seek new guardians and new arrangements for their protection, just as they did when the sun set on the British Empire. The UAE knows it has to survive—or die—alone, in a landscape darkened by the shadow of monsters.

Lines had been drawn across the map in a bewildering number of hues—to be closely examined, so the wry story went, by a colour-blind diplomat. There was the Blue Line, negotiated between Imperial Britain and the Turkish Empire in 1913, which ran from the Gulf of Adaid to the great emptiness of the Rub al-Khali desert. Then, moving eastward, a Green Line, a Brown Line, and a Yellow Line. The........

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