Toll-gates and barbicans of empire: The United States, Great Britain, and the Persian Gulf region, 1950--1968

This dissertation explores the United States' response to the steady decline of British power in the Persian Gulf region between Iran's 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and President Lyndon Johnson's initial efforts in 1968 to cope with Britain's proposed departure from the Gulf by 1971. It treats not only the states bordering the Gulf but also the areas of the Arabian Peninsula and Western Indian Ocean that U.S. and British policymakers considered vital to the Gulf's security. In so doing, this dissertation places the Persian Gulf into its regional political context. This study examines the ways successive British and American governments during the 1950s and 1960s perceived the strategic and economic value of the Persian Gulf to their nations, to the economies of the other industrial democracies, to the political stability of the Middle East in general, and to the larger Western policy of containing Soviet, communist, and radical nationalist influence in the developing world. It explores the ways the United States and Britain apportioned between themselves responsibility for defending the Gulf region from foreign military attack and for mediating tensions between regional governments and political factions. Further, it examines the contrasting attitudes of the United States and Britain to the challenges posed by imperial retrenchment, Arab nationalism, and Pan Arab sentiment in the Gulf. It shows that traditional rivalries and animosities among the peoples of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula greatly complicated U.S. and British Cold War era policies there. Finally, this dissertation plumbs the intricacies and contradictions of the Anglo-American “special relationship” in the formulation of policy in the region.