The US has long conceived Middle East (ME) oil as a remedy for the perceived problem of peak oil, the idea that that global supply would decline everywhere but the ME. I call belief in a scarcity imperative for aggressive ME policy “oil scarcity ideology.” The peak oil models that engendered scarcity ideology came mainly from geologists, but their forecasts were not really works of physical science. They were implicit economic forecasts whose dubious assumptions were that (1) production was a simple function of geology and (2) no economic or technological change could postpone downward production trends. Though three 20th century waves of scarcity ideology were followed by oil market gluts, aggressive policies were never abandoned. The perceived US imperative that force must be asserted to secure scarce ME oil is thus a kind of folklore, impervious to information from the market. Scarcity ideology expressed itself as a science-based Jeremiad incorporating older discourse of Manifest Destiny with newer Progressivist Realism. Based documents from the Mark Requa Papers at the University of Wyoming, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and neglected works like The Strategy of Minerals (1919), I find racial and geographic determinism are central elements in US security policy. Contrary to anti-imperialist and anti-Western critiques of US ME policy, the engine of US aggression was never corporate greed; government always led the way. Official and scholarly subscription to scarcity ideology made aggressive policy seem the only rational course to secure national survival. The influence of this folkloric construct reached its apogee late in the Cold War when the National Security Agency of President Jimmy Carter believed that an oil–starved Soviet Union planned to invade and conquer Iran to secure a supply. Many in the agency, including the National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, were prepared to use nuclear weapons against the oncoming Red Army. This construct found public expression in a 1979 Time cover image in which the Soviet Bear, its head and claws poised above a map of the Persian Gulf, prepared to devour the region. To deter Soviet invasion, Carter declared Persian Gulf oil a vital interest the US would defend by force. The Soviet threat was imaginary. Though several less influential agencies disagreed with Brzezinski’s frightening and baseless Jeremiad, scarcity ideology prevailed. Neither official policy nor the disciplines of political science, history or Middle East Studies have confronted the serial failure of peak oil forecasts to materialize.