In early 1970, with the major oil companies waging a rear-guard battle against an increasingly phalanx-like OPEC, the shah of Iran held a press conference in Tehran at which he expatiated on the machinations of the so-called Seven Sisters (the core group of multinational oil companies, five of them American), denouncing their attempts both to short-change oil-producing countries such as his own and to enlist their governments in the effort. The latter behavior, he stated firmly, was "a precise example of what is called economic imperialism." The charge was hardly novel then and remains pervasive today. Indeed, the debate over US imperialism in the Middle East ignites anew each time the United States elects to pursue its strategic goals in the region via military intervention, as it has done most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In its broader historical contours, the imperialism debate has been marked by a perennial set of controversies, one of which will be my focus. This is the dispute between those who contend that imperialism results from capital drawing the state into foreign military ventures and those who argue the reverse. In exploring this dispute with reference to US foreign policy in the Middle East, I contend that it posits a false dichotomy. Neither of the opposing positions is historically tenable, since capital and the state in fact have propelled one another into the region, with neither pulling the other in its train for any significant length of time without a reversal of roles. Further, I argue that one of the more ambitious alternatives to this account––the theory that the distinction between the state and capital is itself illusory––fails the test of history, and specifically history as it unfolded from the beginning of significant US engagement in the Middle East in the post-WWI era through the consolidation of OPEC in the 1970s.