Book review: AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain by David Wearing
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
22 October 2018
Considering the region’s importance to the UK, it’s surprising to discover this essential and deeply impressive book is the first comprehensive study of the UK’s relationship with the authoritarian states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Taking a broadly Marxist perspective – the Middle East scholars Gilbert Achcar and Adam Hanieh are thanked for their guidance in the acknowledgements – David Wearing sets out how Britain has played an important role “in the promotion and preservation of monarchical rule in the region”, which, in turn, has helped the UK to maintain its global power status since the demise of the British Empire.
Turning to the primary reason for Western interference in the region, Wearing, a Teaching Fellow at in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, notes “The UK’s current interest in Gulf oil and gas is less about direct energy supply and more about strategic, geopolitical and commercial interests”. He takes a similarly wide-angle analysis of the billions of pounds worth of weapons the UK sells to the GCC, arguing the arms trades are of key strategic value to British military power rather than simply about commercial profit. In addition, British arms sales have “enable[d] autocratic governments to stay in power”, Professor Eugene Rogan, the Director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, with many of the weapons “used against their own people”.
For example, Saudi Arabian soldiers rode into Bahrain to help crush the 2011 popular uprising in Tactica Armoured Personnel Carriers manufactured by BAE Systems in Newcastle Upon Tyne. “Even the police dogs we have are trained up by a British company called Top Dog”, the Bahraini activist Ala’a Shehabi told me in 2015.
Wearing also does a public service by devoting a section of the book to the ongoing Saudi-led, UK and US-backed assault on Yemen – the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet today, according to the United Nations. With the war energising Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, according to a UN panel of experts, Wearing contends the ongoing slaughter is a good illustration of “the strength of the British state’s commitment to support the Saudi kingdom even in the face of considerable pressure and criticism”.
Carefully written and well referenced, Wearing writes in a very controlled academic style which is accessible to the general reader. He ends with some brief comments about an alternative UK foreign policy: abandon attempts to project power on the international stage, restrict the military posture to one of self-defence, and transfer the arms industry’s highly-skilled workforce to the growing renewable energy sector.
Though Wearing doesn’t mention it, the best chance of achieving these much-needed changes in the near future is almost certainly a Corbyn-led Labour government. If implemented these unprecedented shifts would, of course, transform our relationship with the Gulf autocracies, giving civil society activists and the people of the GCC a fighting chance of winning significant democratic change in their own nations.
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