The Long War: Oil, Insecurity, and the United States in the Middle East

Over the course of the 20th century, American policymakers have made protecting the security of the Persian Gulf region one of their chief political-economic concerns. The pursuit of American power in the Gulf has been fraught with peril, however, proving costly in both blood and treasure. Security, if that is measured by the absence of conflict, has been elusive. Since the late 1970s the Gulf has been rocked by revolution and almost permanent war. Securing the Persian Gulf and protecting its region’s oil producers increasingly meant more direct and dearer forms of U.S. intervention. The U.S. led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the military occupation there represented the latest stage of American militarism in the Middle East. While more considerable in scale, duration, and devastation than previous military misadventures in the region, the Iraq war was the outgrowth of several decades of strategic thinking and policymaking about oil and security.

As my paper seeks to argue, the pattern of militarism that began in the Persian Gulf in the 1970s has partly been the product of the deliberate militarization of and American support for brutal and vulnerable authoritarian regimes. Massive weapons sales to oil autocrats and the commitment to building a geopolitical military order in the Gulf that depended on them and empowered them, resulted in a highly weaponized but also highly fragile balance of power. Since then, oil states have faced repeated internal and external threats. Indeed, oil producers have either been directly engaged in or faced the imminent prospect of domestic unrest, invasion, and regional or civil war. Rather than stability, the United States’ efforts to assert its hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and the desire to shore up a geopolitical order that many believed would best serve the country’s material interests, instead helped produce the opposite.