Securing the Gulf
By Kenneth M. Pollack
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2003

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

In 1968, the United Kingdom relinquished its security responsibilities "east of 
leaving the United States to pick up the pieces. Chief among the inherited obligations 
was ensuring the stability and security of the strategically vital Persian Gulf region. 
In the decades since, Washington has tried to do this job in various ways, relying on 
the "twin pillars" of Iran and Saudi Arabia during the 1970s, "tilting" toward Iraq during
 the 1980s, and pursuing the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran during the 1990s. 
None of these approaches worked very well, and as a result, the United States has 
had to intervene directly three times in the last 16 years against regional threats -- 
Iran in 1987-88 and Iraq in 1991 and this past spring.

The sweeping American and British military victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom has 
now cleared the way for the United States to try to establish a more durable framework 
for Persian Gulf security. Indeed, the Bush administration is already starting to do so 
by withdrawing the vast majority of American troops from Saudi Arabia, although this 
move seems more about closing an old chapter of American involvement than about 
opening a new one. With Saddam Hussein gone, a broad rethinking of U.S. strategy 
toward the region is necessary, because in some ways the security problems of the 
Persian Gulf are now likely to get more challenging instead of less.

For example, Iran's naval threat to Persian Gulf shipping in the 1980s was easy to handle, 
because the vast preponderance of power enjoyed by U.S. naval and air forces enabled a 
relatively small military campaign to achieve the desired effect. Similarly, although the air 
and ground threat from Saddam's Iraq eventually required a pair of much greater efforts to 
eliminate it, in essence it too was a relatively straightforward military problem. The threats 
that the United States and its allies will confront in the future, however, are unlikely to be 
as simple or discrete as these. The Bush administration must therefore start thinking now 
about how to counter them, or risk leaving the United States ill prepared for what it will 
encounter down the road.

IT'S THE OIL, STUPID

America's primary interest in the Persian Gulf lies in ensuring the free and stable flow of 
oil from the region to the world at large. This fact has nothing to do with the conspiracy 
theories leveled against the Bush administration during the run-up to the recent war. U.S. 
interests do not center on whether gas is $2 or $3 at the pump, or whether Exxon gets 
contracts instead of Lukoil or Total. Nor do they depend on the amount of oil that the 
United States itself imports from the Persian Gulf or anywhere else. The reason the United
States has a legitimate and critical interest in seeing that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow 
copiously and relatively cheaply is simply that the global economy built over the last 50 
years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil, 


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