While American lawmakers focus on the future of war-torn Korea, a struggle of potentially much greater strategic importance is taking place in Iran.

No thoughtful Western observers were happy when Premier Razmara of Iran was assassinated a few months ago. [Ali Razmara] They foresaw a period of economic and political strife — communist-inspired — which could disrupt Iran’s heavy oil shipments to Britain and other Western countries.

Their worst fears are being realized. Razmara’s death has been followed by internal turbulence that bodes ill for the West.

The properties of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., in which Britain was majority stockholder, have been nationalized. Strikes in the field and other difficulties have slowed the oil flow to a trickle. Premier Mossadegh, successor to Razmara, has revealed the insecurity of his government by publicly expressing fears for his life.

How serious all this is for the West can be seen by resort to a few elemental statistics. Iran’s annual oil output of more than 30 million tons represents more than a third of the Middle East’s total production. Anglo-Iranian’s Abadan refinery, largest in the world, itself turns out 25 million tons of refined oil.

These properties supply 25 per cent of Britain’s total petroleum products, and they also fuel a substantial part of the industrial and military machine in other Western nations.

In a recent dispatch from Paris, Leon Dennen, NEA correspondent in Europe, quoted a former Soviet oil official as laying General Eisenhower’s entire North Atlantic defense program may be jeopardized by a drastic oil drought if the flow from Iran and perhaps other Middle East sources is cut off. Together these sources account for 90 per cent of the oil consumed in NATO countries. [Dwight D. Eisenhower]

To be sure, British oil men do not fear that Iranian oil will be deliberately barred from Britain, or sold in great quantity to Russia. The Iranian government has assured the British it wants to keep on selling to them and other regular western customers. But what worries the British is how much oil there’ll be to sell.

The Iranians now rely on 2,700 skilled European workers, but they want to replace them with natives. A British oil economist compares this outlook to the situation in Mexico after that country expropriated foreign oil holdings in 1938. He says: “It took Mexico nine years to get back to the level of output at the time the properties were seized.”

So long as Iran insists on ousting foreign oil workers and managing production entirely on its own. therefore, prospects are dark. Unless some agreement can be worked out to allow seasoned experts to assist the Iranians, the Russians will gain a signal strategic victory.

The United States is the only other important source from which NATO countries could get oil to make up any Middle East deficiency. And it’s an unsettled question how much of that added burden we could bear. We are not now an oil-exporting country.

No communique from the Korean front is more vital to the West’s future than the dispatch from Tehran which will tell what finally is to happen to Iranian oil.