ABSTRACT
William B. Quandt is the Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He served as a staff member on the National Security Council from 1972 to 1974 and participated in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty from 1977 to 1979. In economic terms, the cost of pursuing US policies in the Middle East is not so easy to calculate. For implementing Middle East policy between 1945 and 2000, Congress authorized, just in terms of budget outlays, expenditures of about 200-250 billion dollars. With respect to the US interest in Middle East oil, it is probably no exaggeration to say that if the United States and its allies had not had access to that resource at low prices in the 1950s and early 1960s, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan along democratic lines as a bulwark against Soviet expansion would have been exponentially more costly.
