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Crossing the Rubicon? Britain's Withdrawal from the Middle East, 1964–1968: A Bibliographical Review

Pericles, War, observes: 'Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it: it is certainly dangerous to let it go.* The end of the 1960s saw an Anglo-American retreat from the Middle East with often calamitous results, owing to its disregard for the loss of influence to the Soviets and to Arab radicalism. After Britain withdrew from Aden in November 1967, as Daniel Yergin notes, it 'disappeared into the harsh Marxist-Leninist state of South Yemen'.2 Only two months later, Harold Wilson's Labour government announced the withdrawal of British forces from the Persian Gulf by the end of 1971, thereby creating a dangerous power vacuum and at least indirectly contributing to the oil crisis of 196979. Neither of the British actions worried the United States. How had this sorry state of affairs come to pass? The 1960s opened on an optimistic note, with the United States wanting to keep the British in, the Russians out, and the Arab nationalists quiet in the Middle East. John F. Kennedy, who thought his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had needlessly antagonized the Arab nationalists, naively imagined the Egyptian dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to be a fellow new frontiersman on the Nile. US relations with Nasser have been a central