The role of the Eisenhower administration in forcing the withdrawal of British and French troops from Egypt, in return for resuming the flow of U.S. oil to Western Europe and U.S.- backed loans and aid from the IMF and the EXIM Bank to Britain, concentrated minds in Whitehall in December 1956 on the U.K.'s way forward in the Middle East. The Middle East (Official) Committee of the Cabinet requested the Foreign Office to draw up a paper on future political action with regard to Saudi Arabia. The resulting memorandum, drafted by Derek Riches of Eastern Department, regarded the problem as twofold. The U.K. had to contain ‘Saudi territorial expansion and influence which threatens to engulf areas vitally important to us’; and the U.K. had to try to detach Saudi Arabia from the Egyptian bloc and associate her with those Middle Eastern states who were well disposed to the West. The Buraimi issue was central to the problem because it was at the heart of the first objective, and the U.S. government, and perhaps some Baghdad Pact allies, believed a concession over Buraimi would achieve the second objective. The U.S. government had constantly argued that the action taken at Buraimi in October 1955, and the U.K.'s subsequent ‘inflexibility’ had done harm to Western interests in the Middle East. The U.S. had made especial play with this argument in the summer of 1956 when they had intensified their efforts to wean King Sa’ud from Nasser. Similarly, and particularly following the Anglo-French-Israeli operations against Egypt, the Iraqi prime minister and the presidents of Pakistan and the Lebanon thought that a move by the U.K. to resolve the Buraimi dispute might be decisive in moving King Sa’ud away from the Egypto-Syrian alliance and towards the West. But the arguments against any British concessions on Buraimi were formidable. The only solution the Saudis would accept would be one that gave them a foothold in Buraimi, i.e. a ‘beachhead’. From this beachhead the Saudis could undermine the British position on the Trucial Coast and destroy the authority of the Sultan in the interior of Oman. It was a vital interest of the British government to maintain its influence in the Trucial States and Oman because they controlled the entrance to the Gulf and because they had oil.