Conclusion

Abstract

What historical and historiographical conclusions are to be drawn from the tortuous story of Anglo-American diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region from the 1950s to the early 1970s? What themes suggest themselves as most important to scholars of the period and of the region? What is most striking is the largeness and rich diversity of the Persian Gulf area. As conceived by British and U.S. policymakers during the Cold War, it extended from the expanses of the western Indian Ocean to the mouth of the Red Sea, eastward to the Strait of Hormuz, and north to Kuwait. The region comprised the tiny, but increasingly wealthy, Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, the even smaller coral atolls of the Indian Ocean island chains, the bustling and chaotic port colony of Aden and its desolate hinterlands, as well as the large and politically powerful monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Arabs, Persians, Shias, Sunnis, South Asians, East Africans, Britons, and Americans all converged in the Gulf region in pursuit of their varied interests. It is a mistake, therefore, to view the Persian Gulf as merely an assemblage of tiny oil emirates on the western shore of an inland waterway. Rather, it is a large region of Southwest Asia whose highly varied but interrelated parts composed a single diplomatic theater for U.S. and British foreign policy-makers and strategists during the middle twentieth century.KeywordsSaudi ArabiaMiddle EastArabian PeninsulaGulf RegionImperial RetreatThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.