1973, 2023- the difference

May 15, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- When the October 6, 1973 War unfolded, the Arab world reacted with fury and energy.  On October 17, 2073, the Arab oil embargo rocked the world, sending it tumbling on its face.  It is a different world today, one that operates with a much lower level of interest, a separate kind of reaction.

For there was October 7, 2023, and while the Palestinians are being eradicated like so many vermin and flies, there was the Arab world, a spent force, a tribe now lacking in pride, in any residual potency.  From using oil as a weapon against the West in October 1973, through the crippling oil embargo, since October 2023 has found the Arab world locked in an embargo of its mind, of its will.

In October 1973, when the West, led by America, rushed supplies of urgently needed arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the enraged Arab world reacted with arms of its own.  There was the oil embargo that began on October 17, 1973.  Long lines for gasoline in America were what was visible.  The blows to national economies were punishing, very crippling, not as obvious.  Egypt’s Anwar Sadat- a man of war, and a man of peace- caught the Israelis napping on their most sacred day, and when they were worshipping in their synagogues.  The Americans under Richard Nixon rushed to the rescue, even if it meant that the world teetered on the brink of armed confrontation.  The Arabs had the wherewithal then to demonstrate that they had a weapon of their own, could respond in kind, and with more widespread bloodletting.  An economic one, and one that produced international spasms, if not cataclysms.

Today, the difference is an ocean.  There is fracking.  The US is the king of oil exporters.  To some extent, the US has weaned itself away from its former heavy Middle East oil dependency.  What then President Jimmy Carter had to endure, and the energy policies that he initiated, had much foresight about them.  The oil weapon doesn’t have its former potency.  The Vlad Putin attempt to hold Europe hostage in raw winter sizzled for a time, then faded into a drizzle.  But it did cause some disruptions and hastened some rearrangements.

My concern, focus, is not about oil weaponized.  But how the once formidable Arab Bloc has been fragmented, then fallen afoul of its ancient teachings, its once vaunted Brotherhood, and its voice in that regional world, and now anywhere in the world.  When the people living in the Gaza Strip and its extensions need a Big Brother, they can’t even find a baby sister.  This is one of the key differences between October 1973 and its aftermath, and October 2023, and what has blown up since then.  The Arab world is struggling to find its feet, experiencing the greatest difficulty finding its voice.  For a cause that once featured in every discussion, every convention, and every program of resolution.  The Palestinians were used as a call and catalyst for change that was material; in these days, the Palestinian plight is not so much as a whimper from those who had those people’s backs before.

The war that triggered the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was fought fair and square, once the Egyptian Pearl Harbour equivalent was withstood and then through hell in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, and Jordan.  Then, the Arabs had some muscle, the Americans were still reeling from the Vietnam quagmire.  In 2025, the roles are reversed, with America on the road to being great again, and the Arabs long reduced to states of dissipation and psychological atrophy.  Fat budgets and sybaritic lifestyles have forced men, who once believed in something, to mince their words, and even go so far as to make sure that they are seen and not heard.  The seeing is on me, as a courtesy.  The budgets have to be maintained, and also the lifestyles that would make a Roman Emperor, or a Babylonian one, take a sabbatical.

In such circumstances, who has time for people with little rope left, those who have become a drag (just by their conditions) and of whom the bigshots in the Arab world used to brag.  When the West got hard and rough, the Arabs became soft and flabby.  Mentally first, then psychologically.  The exception to the sitting Middle East crowd is Iran.  The Iranians are not even Arabs, but Persians.  They still retain some streaks of that old spirit of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, which is what makes them dangerous people not to be pushed too far.  Other than them, the old Arab world is gone, when it is needed to be the voice of influence, one with some restraining power.  There is nothing of the sort.

The insights I grab from all this are that new alignments are being formed, the world remapped.  Unfortunately, the Palestinians are not even a dot in the new ordering of priorities.  This is not about splitting the difference; it is all the differences in the world.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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