U.S. gasoline prices rose above $2 per gallon, and California braced for a possible summer of brownouts, American politicians and commentators often referred back to the "Energy Crisis" of the 1970s, and television news shows replayed grainy old footage of cars waiting lined up ten or twenty deep at gas station pumps. One generation of Americans were reminded of an event they had perhaps half-forgotten, and another perhaps heard of it for the first time.
In 1973, as a protest of US support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed to an embargo on oil exports to the United States. Gasoline prices in the US immediately shot up, and panic buying led to frequent local shortages. To Americans it was a revelation of helplessness, and what was regarded as blackmail by distant foreign countries. Coming as it did after failure in Vietnam, it was even seen as marking the beginning of American decline in the world.
In the Arab and Islamic world, however, and indeed in much of the Third World, the 1973 oil embargo was viewed very differently. The oil-producing countries had asserted control over their own natural wealth, and shaken off the domination of the Western-dominated international oil companies. This seemed to presage a vast transformation in the political and economic power relations between the industrialized West and the Third World. From now on, the relationship would be one of bargaining between equals, not one of domination by the West and especially the United States.
Events in the next few years seemed to underline this theme. Billions of dollars poured into the coffers of the oil states, and were put to work in national development projects. In 1979, the Iranian revolution led to a second "oil shock," with another surge of prices and wave of gasoline shortages. Along with the Iranian hostage crisis, American weakness seemed ...