Persian Gulf Has the West by the Jugular No Longer

The general public should be forgiven for not giving much thought these days to President Jimmy Carter’s statement in his 1980 State of the Union address, popularly labeled the “Carter Doctrine”:

“Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

The Iran-Iraq war is over, the Ayatollah Khomeini is dead, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has long lost its sting and the Soviets have withdrawn from Afghanistan and show no sign, if they ever did, of making a grab for Iranian or Saudi oil fields.

Yet the doctrine lives on, with a whole industry of scholars, soldiers and policy-makers supporting it, doctored into longevity by Ronald Reagan’s sharp buildup of American naval and air power. And President Bush’s propensity to let sleeping dogs lie keep’s the doctrine’s life-spirit intact.

Public opinion has already absorbed the more benign atmosphere, but top policy-makers appear to be failing to acknowledge not just the changed Soviet attitude but the equally profound changes in the power of the oil industry and of Islamic fundamentalism. This is extraordinarily intellectually silly, not to say costly to the taxpayer.

The policy-makers need to be confronted with a few hard facts:

The Persian Gulf, and in particular the infamous Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is its entrance, is no longer the “jugular” of the Western economies. The rapid construction of overland pipelines is reducing its importance by the day. Besides, as the Iran-Iraq war revealed, it was not feasible to block the strait by sinking ships in its entrance. Its waters run too deep and its currents are too strong. Moreover, the war showed that large modern-day tankers are not especially vulnerable targets. Their very size makes them difficult to sink and crude oil is not particularly flammable. It’s nothing more than a myth that shipping got through during the war because of the presence of American, British, French and Dutch naval forces. Attacks on shipping actually increased by 60% in the year following the beginning of naval patrols.

The oil market has totally changed since the huge price rises of 1973 and ’79. Indeed, so slack is the market that the Iran-Iraq war made no notable impact on oil prices, even though insurance rates rose sharply for ships transiting the Gulf.

OPEC no longer has the power to play on Western fears about oil prices. And nothing in its achievements suggests it ever should have been otherwise. The price hikes of ’73 and ’79 certainly happened, but we now know they were accelerated and exaggerated by a speculative panic concerning future supplies. The OPEC countries themselves have learned that they are as much the losers when they help push the Western economies into recession.

Certain oil gurus earned large consulting fees predicting that oil prices were unlikely to come down and that the dependence on Persian Gulf oil would continue indefinitely. In fact, in real terms, oil prices are not much different from what they were before the price rises, and by 1985 dependence on the Gulf nations’ oil could not have been more different than it was in 1980. The United States was down from 30% to 7% of all oil imports, Western Europe from 60% to 35% and Japan from 70% to 59%.

Conservation, more technologically proficient extraction policies, new discoveries and the substitution of other energy sources were the successful legacy of the price antics of ’73 and ’79.

The third leg of the oil threat has been the long-held belief that Moscow has a greedy strategic eye on the oil-producing states. The invasion of Afghanistan rang the alarm bells, convincing many that it was the first step in a long-term Soviet drive to the Gulf.

But as Prof. Robert Johnson argues in a long and thoughtful analysis in the current issue of Harvard’s International Security, this is simply not true. “The Soviets must assume the Iranians would resist any military advance. And they’ve been reminded in Afghanistan that local forces operating in mountainous terrain can put up a very considerable resistance.”

Some argue that the Soviets could take power through “invitations” from local regimes. Yet experience has shown that radical regimes in the Middle East usually repress local Communist parties, are highly nationalistic and may be Islamic-fundamentalist.

Even before perestroika, it was never very clear why the Soviets would want to take these kinds of risks. In the late 1970s, the CIA argued that Soviet oil production was about to go into rapid decline and the Soviets would have to look elsewhere for oil. The decline has not happened, and the Soviet Union remains the world’s largest oil producer.

The final argument for Western worriers has been the view that Iranian fundamentalism might come to dominate a significant part of the Gulf. But if Iran failed with Iraq, which has the Arab world’s largest Shiite community and therefore the one most sensitive to Khomeini’s brand of Islamic fervor, the chance of success elsewhere is, to say the least, unlikely.

The Carter Doctrine was born of anxiety and hyped by panic. Calmer times now suggest that it be quietly buried--the deeper into the Arabian sands the better.