Abstract

"U.S. Businesses, Petrodollars, and Interdependence with the Middle East in the 1970s"

David Wight, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (wightd@uci.edu)

Popular accounts and scholarship have tended to portray the decade of the 1970s as one of divisions and animosities between the United States and the Middle East. The 1973 oil shock and Arab oil embargo against the United States are central to this narrative, as Middle East states wrested petroleum policy out of the hands of the US multinational oil companies and Washington, spurring a wave of popular American recriminations against the Arab world and to a lesser degree imperial Iran. My research provides an important counterpoint to this dominant narrative, demonstrating how the vastly increased petrodollar revenues of the oil-exporting countries spurred increased cooperation between a range of US businesses and Middle East states after the 1973 oil shock.

Utilizing newly declassified records from US, UK, IMF, and World Bank official archives; personal and organizational papers; economic data; and Arab, Iranian, and US media, I demonstrate how US corporate leaders collaborated with Washington and Middle East governments to establish new or expanded business ties between the United States and the Middle East during the 1970s under the logic of interdependence. Overcoming geopolitical and economic divisions, US businesses and Arab states and Iran utilized petrodollar wealth in joint projects that included massive military buildups and unprecedented development projects in the MENA countries, foreign aid projects in the larger Third World, and investment programs in the United States. This program brought enormous revenues to US multinational businesses and banks, augmented the geopolitical power of the United States and its Arab and Iranian allies, and served the global expansion of an increasingly deregulated capitalism. It also prompted US business-oriented media to extol US-Middle East interdependence as a solution to national and global problems, presenting Arabs and Iranians as partners to Americans, countering negative narratives about Middle East peoples.