The U.S. seeks to shore up security in the Persian Gulf
The barren hills near the Iraqi border town of Khanaqin quaked with the thump of artillery fire last week. While Iraqi MiGs and Iranian Phantoms dueled in the skies overhead, tanks were battling on the ground, yet again, over a patch of disputed frontier. Iraq and Iran have been skirmishing along their border for nearly two years, ever since the downfall of the late Shah. The fighting did not spread, but it underlined afresh the edgy, mercurial state of the Persian Gulf region, repository and supplier of so much of the world's oil.
In Washington, in the capitals of Western Europe, in Tokyo, the future of the countries around the gulf has become an obsession with policymakers, diplomats, generals and economists. There is nothing altruistic about their concern. Approximately 40% of the oil consumed by the non-Communist world, including nearly a third of the U.S.'s imports, comes from the gulf. Moreover, since the region holds more than 50% of the world's known petroleum reserves, the economies of the West—not to mention of the Third World—will increasingly depend on the security of the wells and tanker lanes of the gulf.
That security is in jeopardy at virtually every point of the compass. To the north, Iran sinks deeper and deeper into chaos. To the west, what is widely seen as Israel's intransigence emboldens radicals, undercuts moderates and enrages almost everyone in the Arab world. To the south, the memory of last year's attack by zealous dissidents on the Sacred Mosque in Mecca still sends shudders through the House of Saud and the monarchies that rule the gulfs ministates. In the waters of the gulf itself, a Soviet guided-missile cruiser and its frigate escort have replaced the Shah's navy in patrolling the shipping channel through the 40-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz. The U.S.S.R. now maintains 85,000 troops in Afghanistan and has military advisers in South Yemen and Ethiopia, while a fleet of ten Soviet warships and 16 support vessels cruises the Indian Ocean.
The rise of anti-Western Islamic militancy, the instability of the gulf states,* the explosiveness of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the buildup of Soviet power have generated intense anxiety, even some apocalyptic pessimism among Western statesmen. "We are on a roller coaster to disaster," said Henry Kissinger in congressional testimony last July. "Our future is now at the mercy of a precarious political status quo in what is probably the most volatile, unstable and crisis-prone region of the world."
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski believes that the U.S. and its allies can still head off disaster. "The area I once called the arc of crisis [the northern and western rim of the Indian Ocean] may well be the focus of our major effort in the 1980s to enhance geopolitical stability," Brzezinski says. "Between 1945 and 1955, the major thrust was in Western Europe and the Far East. From 1955 on, it was in assuring overall strategic stability vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. It is very likely that in the 1980s we will be involved in an unprecedented effort to assure stability, and therefore exercise deterrence, in the Persian Gulf area."