Experts derived this ideology from a syllogism of secular apocalysm and economic fabulism. The apocalypse was that peak oil was near. The fabulism was that other countries would try to interrupt US supply as the world ran out of oil. In 1979, for example, the USSR was expected to invade the Middle East to offset its dwindling domestic production. Middle East oil producer-states countries were believed to possess an “oil weapon” with which they could punish the US by withholding supply. Implicit was that these states were strictly non-economic actors, zealots with enormous market power who greatly preferred political expression to earning money from exports. The conclusion to this logic was that the US must exert military force to protect Middle East supply. Things got started in 1908, when scientists of the US Geological Survey forecast US production would end by 1935. Belief in peak oil and corollary threats to supply led to steady foreign policy escalations. These were the 1953 coup against Iran, the Carter Doctrine of 1980, support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and the 1991 Gulf War. Though peak oil anxiety was higher than ever by 2003, oil scarcity became less important as a rationale for Middle East policy. By then, decades of US policy decisions based on scarcity ideology had destabilized the region, a condition that provided its own rationales for intervention. Because it was so often proved wrong, the persistence of oil scarcity ideology is an enigma. I believe it persists, first of all, because peak oil seems scientific and is warranted as such by experts. Predicting disaster is a venerable and prestigious social role. Scientific interest in catastrophe began long before science was a secular pursuit. Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and other luminaries sought the schedule for Biblical Apocalypse in natural phenomena like floods, meteors, earthquakes and epidemics. Their premise was that since God created nature, it could be studied to reveal secrets Scripture did not reveal, like when the world would end. The geologists and political scientists who constructed scarcity ideology merely secularized this activity, and drew authority from the deep cultural resonance of apocalyptic stories.

Charles Hamilton, an American oil executive who worked in the oil industry between 1912 and 1957, culminating in his role as the Vice President of Gulf Oil corporation, noted in his memoirs: “Many persons feel that American commercial interests might not have had the opportunity to participate in the development of the great oil fields of the Middle East had it not been for the splendid work of the Arabian mission.” As Hamilton’s statements revealed, the first Americans in the Gulf region were not American engineers searching for oil reserves or businessmen seeking to obtain drilling rights, but instead, a group of American missionaries from the Reformed Church of America (RCA) who had arrived in the area in 1889. Over the next twenty years, the RCA would go on to open dozens of missionary stations throughout the Arabian Gulf, including what is now Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Their primary strategy for converting local Arab Muslims to Protestant Christianity included obtaining the good will of locals medical missionary work throughout the Gulf, including the building of hospitals. American Protestant missionaries believed that the technological advancements represented by medicine were reflective of the larger superiority of Christian civilization over Islamic civilization. Although American missionaries managed to convert only a handful of Arab Muslims, their expansive and impressive network of connections throughout the Arabian Gulf, forged primarily through their medical work, reached the highest level of political power, including Ibn Saud himself. It was this very network that would not only set the stage for the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia – but later facilitate the work of the engineers and businessmen who obtained American oil concessions with Ibn Saud. Although the missionaries’ local knowledge directly benefited American oil executives, it drew increasing suspicion from local British political agents, who saw the American missionaries as working hand in glove with Americans seeking to spread their commercial reach throughout Arabia, to the detriment of their own commercial and political power. This paper will analyze these tensions as British political agents sought to limit the rising influence of American missionaries in the Arabian Gulf in the first half of the twentieth century, the same decades that witnessed the slow erosion of British power in the Middle East.

In July 1968, the Ba‘th Party of Iraq was involved in pair of coups d'état that overthrew the nationalist government of Iraqi Prime Minister Tahir Yahya. The Yahya government had, over the course of the preceding year, taken dramatic steps toward the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) – a consortium of some of the largest multinational oil corporations. After taking power in July 1968, the Ba‘th party moderated its stance with regard to the IPC and deferred further steps toward nationalization. Recently published scholarship argues that the American CIA helped engineer the 1968 coups as part of an effort to preserve IPC control over Iraqi oil. In this paper, I analyze recently declassified U.S. documents and IPC records to argue that while prominent American business groups expressed sympathy for the new Ba'thist regime in Baghdad, there is, as yet, no available evidence that these business groups received any official support from Washington. On the contrary, key policymakers within the Lyndon Johnson administration had come to see the Ba‘ath as a Cold War “enemy” by the late 1960s. This case speaks to the difficulty of defining American “national interests” with regard to oil and to the tension between pro-Israeli and pro-IPC factions within the American foreign policymaking community.

A near perfect storm of crises confronted US policy towards the Middle East in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the security front, the intensification of the Arab-Israeli conflict hastened the end of longstanding arrangements underwriting North Atlantic dominance over the global system of oil production and distribution. As waves of resource and infrastructure nationalization brought an end to this old regime, a new financial crisis was also emerging, the end of Bretton Woods. The solution to this crisis was not only fiat currency but also the increasing use of arms sales to Middle Eastern states to recirculate dollars back to the United States, notably led by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Preexisting conflicts were not only used to justify the expansive militarization of the Middle East but new threats were constituted as well. In this context, the radical internationalist ambitions of the early Gaddafi regime in Libya were easily articulated within the political economy of the “armadollar-petrodollar coalition” vis-à-vis Kissinger’s repatterning of US security relations across the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi used his state’s vast oil wealth in the 1970s not only to fund resistance and terrorist organizations, he also built one of the largest and ultimately most useless militaries from armaments purchased from the Soviet Union. Using a combination of quantitative, archival, and secondary sources, this paper aims to rethink the geopolitical functions of Libya during the initial securitization of the Gaddafi regime in the 1970s. In so doing, this paper will not only elaborate the global political economy behind Middle Eastern insecurity, it will also account for the emergence of durable images of the Gaddafi regime that played into US reactions to the 2011 crisis in Libya.