The Oil Kings
How the US, Iran and Saudi-Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Oil Kings offers the first inside look at how an oil crisis was manipulated by Alan Greenspan, Donald Rumsfeld, and President Ford (hoping to secure his re-election), helping to precipitate the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Andrew Scott Cooper reveals the fatal struggle between the "oil kings", both Middle-Eastern and American, as they jockeyed for power, playing games that led directly to the rise of Iran's radical anti-American theocracy, which still exists today. An intrepid investigative reporter, Andrew Scott Cooper is the first to access newly declassified papers, and to interview key people who formulated US foreign poilicy in that period. Carefully connecting up the dots, he brilliantly reconstructs the history of that vexed decade when the modern world was changed forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The petro-politics of the 1970s caused world-historical upheavals and an international melodrama of statecraft in this scintillating diplomatic history. Historian Cooper untangles the foreign policy conundrum arising from America's support for the reliably anticommunist Shah of Iran, whom Richard Nixon encouraged to raise oil prices so he could afford to buy U.S. weapons. This dynamic, the author contends, created a monster: to support his wild overspending on arms and pharaonic development projects, the Shah demanded huge OPEC price hikes that crippled the world economy and provoked an American rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, whose flooding of markets with cheap oil ruined Iran's finances and sped the Shah's downfall. Cooper gives a lucid analysis of shifting oil markets and unearths revelations including American-Iranian planning for invasions of Arab countries from meticulous research. But this is a saga of not-so-great men and their wranglings. Its centerpiece is Cooper's superb, lacerating portrait of Henry Kissinger. As the super-diplomat's obsession with great-power rivalries founders in a new world of global economics that he can't fathom, Cooper gives us both a vivid study in sycophancy and backstabbing and a shrewd critique of Kissingerian geo-strategy. Photos.