ABSTRACT
It is no new experience for the nations of the Persian Gulf to find their region an arena for the conflicts of the world’s great powers. It is a new experience for the great powers themselves, however, to have to come to terms with their own dependence on the resources, and on the decisions, of those nations which in earlier times had been little more than the objects of their strategy and diplomacy. It is this new factor and its interaction with the old one that provide the new global setting for the Gulf region.
