The Pursuit of National Interest in the Wake of Changing Anglo-American Relationship: Britain's Responses to the Fourth Middle East Conflict and the First Oil Crisis:The Middle East in International Relations
スポンサーリンク
概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
This article examines the responses of the British government to the fourth Middle East conflict and the first oil crisis, both of which occurred coincidentally in October 1973. The British government led by Edward Heath recognised that Britain had ceased to be a Super Power and that it was experiencing a domestic crisis. It was therefore fully aware that it could not achieve settlements for the Middle East conflict and the oil crisis on its own. However, the differing interests and perceptions towards the crises made it extremely difficult for the British government to cooperate with the United States in particular and to a lesser extent with the European Community.The disagreements between Britain and the United States reflected their respective grasps of the Middle East conflict and their interests in securing oil supply from the Arab oil-producers. The Heath government was more sympathetic to the Arabs, who in fact launched the offensive against the Israelis in 1973. Its consistent understanding was that the Israelis had occupied Arab territories in 1967 and that the acquisition of territory by war was inadmissible. For the Heath government, the Arabs had not crossed an international border to commit aggression, but rather that the fighting was going on in territories that legally, and in the view of the United Nations, belonged to the Arabs. In contrast, the US government initially regarded as the baseline of a ceasefire the dividing line between the Arabs and the Israelis that had been created after the Israeli occupation in 1967. Domestically, the Heath government was facing a huge energy crisis, which was triggered by a ban by coal-miners on overtime work. It was vital for the British government to secure oil imports from the Arab oil-producers, a need not faced by the United States.The Heath government and the Nixon administration disagreed not only over the causes of the conflict, and over how to achieve first a ceasefire and then long-term settlement between the Arabs and the Israelis, but also over the perceptions of the actors involved-including Egypt and the Soviet Union -and particularly with regards oil security. While Heath in fact distrusted the intentions of the Nixon administration, which was confronting the Watergate affair, the US government suspected that the British government, by siding with the Arabs, was deliberately undermining its Middle East policy.This article argues that the British government sided with the Arabs in 1973 in order to secure oil supplies, despite generating acute tension with the United States and the European Community. Such discord, this paper argues, eventually deprived the British government of any significant role in settling the Middle East conflict and the oil crisis.
- 一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会の論文
一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会 | 論文
- ペルシャ湾保護国とイギリス帝国 : 脱植民地化の再検討
- The Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Era of Chinese Nationalist Revolution:East Asia and Japan during a Period of Transition : Historiclal Study
- The Conditionality in the Development Assistance : A Study on the Operational Activities by IMF, the World Bank, and UNDP:The United Nations in a Changing World
- The Sudeten Problem and World Politics between two World Wars:Studies on Diplomatic History of Contemporary Europe
- Hitlers Leadership in Foreign Policy: Chiefly on the Recent Trend of Study in West Germany:The Eve of the Second World War : International Relations in Summer, 1939