The Age of Discretion
BY ELIE KEDOURIE THIS is a bitter moment for Britain in the Middle East. Hulagu has not swooped down in the fair province, there has not even been a fight in a field; yet, what even ten years ago seemed a solid competence is now frittered away, nobody knows quite how, in obscure transactions and unlikely enterprises, and Britain is reduced to giving up her cause into the dubious keeping of a conference where the interested voices of enemies, ill-wishers, lukewarm and equivocating friends may well succeed in smothering whatever resolution exists to redeem the situation and repair the injury.
People say that it was all inescapable; that a ruinous war and the withdrawal from India could not fail mortally to weaken British power and influence in the Middle East. Ultimately, of course, everything is bound up with everything else, and it may well be that these recent catastrophes are the consequence of those powerful but somewhat remote causes. What cannot, however, be denied is that British policy in the area itself must have had some kind of influence over events and must have hastened, or at least failed to postpone, what it consoles some to consider an inevitable decline.
What most forcibly strikes an onlooker is the eccentric shape of British policy in the Middle East in the last quarter of a century or so. Before the First World War the relations of the powers in the area were governed by a set of rules which con- tained the cut and thrust of rivalry and ambition, and preserved from serious encroachment the interests of the several powers. The stakes could not be too high, the game was reasonably safe and any gains or losses it entailed were not beyond the bounds of prudent policy. But it is now clear to us that one of the reasons why the game was, on the whole, successful was that always at least three partners were engaged in it, two of whom could combine against the third should he threaten to overstep the limits. It is therefore one further reason why the Bolshevik Revolution was a great tragedy that, after 1917, it resulted in Russia withdrawing from the game. This created a totally new situation, challenging the wisdom and resource of British policy. British policy failed to live up to the challenge.
After 1917 the temptation of British policy was that British predominance seemed complete—too complete. Everybody in the area, except for the French, seemed the client and depen- dant of the British Empire. And it was then that British foreign policy, usually so cautious, so empirical, so wary of doctrinal entanglements, was violently wrenched from its moorings and launched on doctrinaire adventure. The concatenation of circumstances is awesome : the indiscreet zeal of outsiders whom the accidents of war placed very near the centre of power; the great influence of British officials in Egypt and the • Sudan to whom an anti-French policy was an habitual reflex; the Liberal and Radical Nonconformity of Lloyd George and his associates to whom an alliance with France seemed as un- natural an accident as an alliance with Latin atheistic papists must be. These circumstances ensured that at a time when Britain seemed all-powerful in the Middle East, British policy, forgetting native caution and disdaining to hedge and trim, became anti-French by doctrine and on principle. It is only now, with Russia back to claim an old position, that the futility and improvidence of edging the French out of the Levant have become fully apparent. Equally unrewarding and pointless Seems the acrimonious dispute with the Zionists, ending in the evacuation of Palestine, a melodramatic gesture which, whether the Arab League or the Zionists triumphed, could solve nothing and tend only to this country's disadvantage. And indeed, but for this anachronistic antagonism to France, the Zionist difficulty itself might well have been avoided. For it was largely to extinguish the French claim in Palestine that the Zionists were brought in. Within a year, however, of the Balfour Declaration, the French, of themselves, gave up their claims in Palestine. Their usefulness exhausted at the very outset, the Zionists came more and more to look like an un- welcome burden.
But this, it may be said, is to argue unfairly, with advantage of hindsight. Let then the argument rest. The antagonism to France in the Levant would have made sense had it secured British interests or consolidated British power in the area. But this was inherently impossible, and it is here that the eccen- tricity of British policy is clearly manifest. Oilfields, bases, the loyalty cemented by a common civility and by solid common ' interests, these a‘power may strive for, and consider them well worth the cost and the trouble they entail. What has never been seen before is an imperial power taking it upon itself to be- come the midwife of history. Fate of course may have decreed that Arab unity was inevitable and that the Abbassid Empire shall arise anew, but, surely, prudent statesmen will not think it incumbent on their country to hasten the designs of Provi- dence. Britain, however, preferred to become the patron and friend of limitless and insatiable ambitions, which no rational calculation could moderate, nor scruple assuage. She trusted and exalted men eaten up by political passions, and innocent Little can now be retrieved from this adventure; but here may lie a reason for hope. With Russia once more on the scene, the fabrication of leagues, the encouragement of new forces. the discouragement of old, and suchlike necromancies willy- nilly must cease, and we may then revert to the old familiar game. It may even be agreeable to find oneself back again in the safe, reassuring world of Great Powers and client States sparring and fencing for solid interests and tangible advantages. This is not to say that it will be easy. For this is a crueller and more unpleasant world than that of fifty or a hundred years ago. Today, disastrous illusions are about coricerning the scope and the ends of political power. Old appetites have wakened which grow stronger as they are fed. For the game to be resumed they have somehow to be curbed. The enterprise is difficult and may yet end in failure, but in it there is nothing inherently impossible. The age of discretion may be at hand.
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