THE ARAB DISEMBARGO

During the week when the Arabs were arguing whether to lift the embargo against the US, Radio Moscow was busily broadcasting. In English, it was extolling the spirit of detente; in Arabic, it beamed special programs to the Middle East exhorting the Arabs to continue the embargo against the American imperialists.

The "two-faced political double-dealers" (to use their own vocabulary) could eat their cake and have it, too. As for de'tente, the only substantial difference from the Cold War days seems to be that the US Foreign Secretary now goes around admonishing people not to interfere in internal Soviet affairs (trade concessions enacted by the US Congress apparently being an internal Soviet affair) and that the US Export-Import Bank has been (illegally) granting $225 million in credits, much of it for liquid natural gas that will, if it ever materializes at all, place American energy sources in the trustworthy hands of the Soviet politbureau. For the Soviets, detente is merely the difference of what they say in English and in Arabic. It means letting the US clear the Suez Canal so that they can link up their navies in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

As for continuing the embargo, the disembargo was not all that disembargoed. Their gracious sheikhoods will reassemble on June 1 to see if the US has been "behaving." Production will, at best, be restored to the September 1973 level, which was insufficient to close the US supply gap. And no matter how the sheiks increase their production, US refinery capacity will still fall short by some 3 million b/d this summer. Above all, having tripled oil prices within a few months, what do the sheiks need a formal embargo for?

And yet the news is not all bleak. The relaxation of the Arab embargo is big enough to shorten gas lines in the US this summer; and it is not big enough to obscure the need of making America invulnerable to energy blackmail.

So colonel Gaddaffi may be premature, should he jubilantly decide to sacrifice a goat in his presidential palace.