‘From the standpoint of military advantage,’ Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in 1902, ‘a Russian naval division in the Persian Gulf, although unquestionably a menace to the trade route from Suez to the East, would be most ex-centrically placed as regards all Russia's greatest interests. It is for these reasons … that the good of Russia presents no motive for Great Britain to concede a position so extremely injurious to herself and her dependencies.’ Comparable reasoning continued to suffuse thinking in Whitehall seventy years later, as the British liquidated the remnants of their empire east of Suez. Britain's residual interests in the Indian Ocean remained considerable, particularly on the economic side. Declaring the waters between Suez and Singapore a ‘Zone of Peace’ was popular throughout the Commonwealth, and held substantial political attraction. But, as in Mahan's time, geography, or rather geopolitics, continued to hold primacy of place in the shaping of strategy. The persistent asymmetry between the continental position of the Soviet Union, on one side, and Britain's maritime posture, on the other, left ‘no scope for an arms control solution to Indian Ocean security’. By the mid-1970s, American authorities had come around to a similar view: ‘as a major maritime nation, we have more to lose in an exchange of naval concessions than does the USSR, which is still primarily a land power’.

In 1970, one was more likely to hear such a formulation in Whitehall than in the White House. In 1968, the Labour government led by Harold Wilson announced that Britain would withdraw its last major forces still on station east of Suez by the end of 1971. On assuming office in 1970, the Conservative government led by Edward Heath ordered a detailed review of that decision. In the end, British authorities determined that the process had progressed too far to abort and would thus proceed apace. They looked instead to American sea power as the future basis of security in the Indian Ocean, favouring this so-called ‘defence approach’ over either regional organisation or naval limitations. The diffuse politics of the Indian Ocean's littoral nations rendered regional organisation impractical, while naval limitations appeared incompatible with enduring requirements for sea control and power projection across the Indian Ocean.