Richard Nixon, Great Britain and the Anglo-American alignment in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula : making allies out of clients /

Petersen (history, Norwegian Univ. of Science and Technology) joins the debate about how to make sense of events during and after the October War of 1973 and the round of OPEC oil price rises associated with the Arab oil boycott. Conventional accounts see the moment as a setback for putative vital US interests, whether in terms of cheap energy or the end of the Western oil companies' control of Persian Gulf oil reserves. These facts, which stress the US's increasing dependence on foreign oil, serve as explanations for the Nixon administration's acquiescence to this defeat. Petersen argues that recently declassified records from the Nixon administration strengthen the revisionist case. The US played an active role in the oil price rises, with the higher prices going to pay for arms purchases and base building that both protected the post-Vietnam budget and enmeshed the Iranian and Saudi client states turned allies in security "special" relationships. Petersen argues that scholars have misunderstood the course of events and the transformations in oil states and markets. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. Vitalis University of Pennsylvania