The oil kings
This is an account of an era we thought we knew: how the US decision in the mid-1970s to choose Saudi Arabia as the dominant oil power in the Mideast ultimately led to the Islamic revolution in Iran, and how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. The author draws on newly declassified documents and interviews with some key figures of the time to show how Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments, as well as the Shah of Iran and the Saudi royal family, maneuvered to control events in the Middle East. He details the secret U.S.-Saudi plan to circumvent OPEC that destabilized the Shah; reveals how close the U.S. came to sending troops into the Persian Gulf to break the Arab oil embargo; and shows how the Ford Administration barely averted a European debt crisis that could have triggered a financial catastrophe in the U.S.
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5mentions
3people
2015–2024years
80% recommend20% neutral
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- If you really want to understand the Kissenger era, the best raw source IMO is this:
> "The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East is a 2011 book by Andrew Scott Cooper"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Kings
> "The book discusses Henry Kissinger, the 1970s oil embargo, and the Iranian Revolution. Cooper had stated that the story on how the U.S. became dependent on Saudi Arabia and how U.S. reliance on oil began was "Less well known" compared to the general understanding of U.S. reliance on oil."
Henry Kissenger along with his British and Gulf Arab partners seem to have invented the concept of petrodollar recycling which has buoyed up the value of the US dollar since about 1975 or so. Balance of payments was a problem and Kissenger said to the Gulf Arabs, "we'll maintain your medieval system of government and the special priviledges of the House of Saud just so long as you keep investing the bulk of those profits back into the US economy (see Saud investments in Uber, today)."
If you read Machiavelli's "the prince" you'll know everything you need to know about Kissenger. Never had an original idea in his whole life.
- Agreed. Also misses the global effect of the Arab oil embargo over US support for Israel in the 1973 war, which was amplified further by the rise of OPEC and the concommitant rise in international oil prices. This in turn caused a balance-of-payments problem, which in turn led to petrodollar recycling and the military-economic alliance between Gulf Arab states and the USA (and also, though this is largely forgotten, the Shah of Iran was a major player in that system before being deposed by the Iranian Revolution).
Andrew Scott Cooper's The Oil Kings covers that in some detail:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12348743-the-oil-kings
It's very relevant today as the spike in oil prices is fairly similar, and current US tensions with Saudi Arabia are not all that different from similar tensions with the Shah of Iran at the time.
Additionally, I'm a bit skeptical about the author's claim that full employment is the number one cause of inflation.
- It depends what you want to learn about specifically.
For a general introduction there is an excellent 3 part BBC documentary "Iran and the West":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_the_West
If you want an inside account of things from a 'Prince': "Blood and Oil:: Memoirs of a Persian Prince"
For fascinating insight into Iran's geopolitics, economics and the context of the 1979 revolution (with major implications for the current global oil market) consider Andrew Scott Cooper's excellent book: The Oil Kings
here's an article from 2014 by Cooper to whet your appetite: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/18/why-would-the-saudis-cra...
and here's quite a good interview with Cooper from 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BXCx8oNvoo
His more recent book (not out yet): The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Heaven-Pahlavis-Imperial/dp/0...
But be aware that as always, behind every tyrant walks a cadre of sycophants with bloody mops attempting to twist history & exonerate the guilty. IMHO Hooman Majd, Reza Aslan and Trita Parsi are all varying degrees of apologists for the Islamic regime.
If you have a more specific interest, let me know and perhaps I'll be able to recommend something else.
- 5% +- 1%
I am a strong believer that all people have equal ability, and if all countries were on a equal footing then their GDP size would be more of less reflective of their labour force.
Ofcourse it gets complicated if countries have resources only to their geography.
GDP per capita is a weak measure since america has high inequality, some people in america are as poor and hungry as the worst conditions in africa.
America was built mostly out stealing labour from the rest of the world in a selective way, without taking full advantage of your own labour force.
The unfairness comes when we talk about investment. A lot of counties like India invested heavily on education. What happened to the talent produced by that investment ? They all ran away to US.
Its okay if a small number of people do it, but when a huge portion of the population does it then its not fair to the country involved.
It also allows america to get away with it by not investing in their own education or labour force.
Some countries figured out this game - south korea, china. who force their labour to pay back the investment - is it wrong ? yes.
But given america's hypocrisy they had no other option.
Right now america is loosing its ability to attract talent, since the global financial meltdown in 2008. It used to be a blackhole to world labour and investment (using wallstreet).
But as countries develop american multinationals and the american govt will need to downsize and they are not happy to do it, since it means downsizing its global bullying power.
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If you want to learn more about how america has screwed over humanity.
1) http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Global-Minotaur-Economic-Controv...
2) http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Oil-Kings-Changed-Balance/dp/143...
3)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
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I have been reading about it and making sure things are historically accurate, not only am I becoming more economically literal - I am also enraged about how horrible america has being, I used to celebrate american culture and now really feel bitter. I have been reading them only for the past 20 days or so, so my initial phase of angry is still not complete.
- As far as I know there is no formal petrodollar recycling pact between the United States and Saudi Arabia, nor any termination of the underlying understanding, which is that most of the dollars flowing into the oil states in the Gulf get reinvested back into US and British (and European) economies, and into the IMF and similar entities, in the names of the oil states.
There are a lot of diplomatic cables from the 1970s about the origins of the concept (petrodollar recycling), but fundamentally it was that the Gulf Arab states had few options about where to put their oil money, and so most of it went back to western banks and international loan programs or into expensive property investments and financing Uber by at least $3.5B and so on. In exchange, they get their security guaranteed by US military and economic power. See [1] for a fascinating and well-written history of the period when the deal was implemented.
However, it does seem Iran under the Shah was the first big petrodollar recycler, and he'd already invested a billion dollars each in Britain and France by 1974, which is part of why the Iranian revolution came as such a shock in Washington (and also accounting for the U.S. and Britain and France and Germany pouring material support and loans into Saddam's regime in Iraq as he went to war to seize Iranian oilfields in the early 1980s).
Regardless there's no formal pact I've ever heard of on this, it's more some kind of diplomatic agreement, possibly enforced by the threat of freezing assets for various reasons real or pretend. The problem now is, what if the Gulf states decide they want to put those reserves into big domestic infrastructure projects? what if a majority of contracts going to Chinese firms, who seem better at large-scale solar PV and high-speed trains than the US or Europe does? Will Uber rates have to go up?
[1] "The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East" by Andrew Scott Cooper.
