42THE OIL AGE ARRIVESdependent by the 1960s on barrels from the Middle East. Oil had become
too vital to be cheap.
By the early 1970s, IOC dominance began to slip away. Appeasement
became the last- ditch strategy. Executives did their best to hang on to
their prizes as long as possible and get the best terms. If ties remained
cordial, nationalization, when it came, might at least allow companies to
retain their roles in refining and marketing oil, rather than producing it.
In the Middle East, the looming confrontation was hastened by a
sharpening geopolitical divide. American backing for the 1948 found-
ing of Israel had become a serious irritant in US- Arab relations. Ameri-
can oil executives repeatedly urged Washington to tone down support
for the Jewish nationalist project, which they feared would bring their
lucrative enterprise to a premature end. The pleas of the oilmen failed.
Within a few years, there would be an enormous shift in the terms of
the crude oil trade. The Seven Sisters would stand aside and watch their
foreign assets and concessions swept away in a tidal wave of national-
ization. The rupture in relations between formerly pliant Arab rulers and
their Western concessionaires would usher in one of the most spectac-
ular transfers of wealth and power in human history.^36 The once poor
and isolated Arab sheikhdoms would take center stage, emerging in con-
trol of one of the most crucial levers of the global economy.