Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American Exceptionalism, Hierarchy, and Hegemony in the Gulf

Roosevelt received him British ambassador Lord Halifax that very evening at the White House. Their discussion focused on the Middle East. Trying to allay Halifax's apprehension and irritation, Roosevelt showed the ambassador a rough sketch he had made of the Middle East. Persian oil, he told the ambassador, is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it is ours. Throughout the 1950s Anglo-American strategy rested on an oil cartel. … The five American and two British multinationals involved represented the substance of empire in the Middle East. In the Gulf, the United States has ironically broken with its former dictum that we would oppose domination of the Gulf region by any single power. We have become that power and now we have to accept the consequences of that fact. For readers who possess even a general familiarity with the works of Rex Casillas, Fred Halliday, Roger Louis, Khaldun al-Naqeeb, Aaron David Miller, David Painter, Ghassan Salame, Michael Stoff, and others, it may be reasonable to ask if there is much to add at this juncture to the many expert accounts of the end of British hegemony in Saudi Arabia and the beginning of the U.S. Saudi “special relationship.” Douglas Little, a fine practitioner of the craft in his own right, has surveyed the state of recent Middle East diplomatic historiography, where it is now conventional to begin the narrative of postwar imperial demise with the Saudi case, because nowhere else in the Middle East was America's rise to dominance so rapid, complete, and seemingly irreversible.4