2INTRODUCTIONmonarchies were flush with oil, which flowed from supergiant fields dis-
covered from the 1930s through the 1970s— Ghawar in Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait’s Burgan field, the Murban structure in Abu Dhabi.
These repositories provided the petroleum that powered the postwar
Free World. Gulf oil fueled the West German Wirtschaftswunder, Japan’s
economic miracle, and the suburban commuter belts of the American
colossus. It was easy oil, pooled in boundless reservoirs that practically
geysered into action with the prick of a drill bit. Almost all the oil pro-
duced could be sold abroad; Gulf populations were tiny, their economies
undeveloped. Oil demand in the six monarchies was a mere rounding
error on global consumption.
The Gulf became the strategic heartland of America’s energy security.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Washington saw a threat
to the oil; US president Jimmy Carter declared that America would go
to war, if necessary, to defend the monarchies. A decade later, President
George H. W. Bush put the Carter Doctrine into action, rolling back Sad-
dam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The doctrine remains in force
today. Since the early 1970s, America has provided security for these
weak, young states and made sure tankers brimming with oil could
thread their way through the Strait of Hormuz and other chokepoints
to keep the world supplied.
In each of the six Gulf monarchies, a traditional ruling sheikh divided
up the riches. With oil’s help, they lifted their subjects out of the pov-
erty that had entrapped countless previous generations. Rulers lavished
their countrymen with cheap gasoline, cheap electricity, and cheap water.
Subsidies on energy were a key part of national development plans that
also provided jobs, housing, medicine, and education. Oil allowed rul-
ing sheikhs to make their subjects wealthy and complacent. In return,
subjects threw their support behind the sheikhs. It was a virtuous cycle.
Those days are gone. Forty years of compounding annual growth have
raised Gulf energy consumption to some of the highest levels in the
world, measured on a per capita basis or— more importantly— in terms
of oil consumed per unit of gross domestic product. As the rest of the
world grows more energy efficient, the sheikhdoms of the Gulf are going
the other way, using ever more energy to produce a dollar of economic