Britain is to open a new £15 million naval base in Bahrain, the country’s Foreign Office announced Friday, which will be first permanent UK military presence in the Middle East in more than 40 years.
Under a deal signed with the Bahraini government, improvements will be made to the Gulf state’s Mina Salman Port, which is already used on an ad-hoc basis by four UK mine-hunter ships, creating a permanent forward operating base.
The base will “enable Britain to send more and larger ships to reinforce stability in the Gulf” said UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon. “We will now be based again in the Gulf for the long term,” he said.
The move represents a potentially significant shift in British defence strategy.
The country has not had a permanent military base in the Middle East since it formally withdrew from the region in 1971, a long-term result of the Suez crisis of the 1950s where Britain was forced into a humiliating backdown in the face of international pressure.
The episode gave rise to the expression “east of Suez”, an evocative phrase in British politics to denote the country’s military presence, or lack thereof, in the Middle and Far East in the post-Empire years.
Britain’s return “east of Suez” may suggest to some a return to the country’s imperialistic ambitions of the past despite its decline as a global power.
But with its armed forces the smallest they have been in more than a century, the UK is less well equipped now to police an area as volatile as the Middle East than it was in the 1970s, which raises the question as to why the government has decided to head back there now.
http://www.france24.com/en/20141206-analysis-what-behind-uk-return-middle-east-bahrain-navy/
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