ABSTRACT
The extension of fighting in the Iran-Iraq war to include attacks on oil tankers and other vessels in the Persian Gulf has once again focused attention on the issue of the Western world's dependence on Middle Eastern crude oil. The student of international oil politics might be forgiven if he imagines himself living, in Ortega y Gasset's phrase, at "the height of the times." Minerals analysts, especially those in the United States, often employ the label "strategic minerals" to cover those minerals that are held to be both essential to a state's economic and military well-being. Hardly unambiguous concept interdependence has been a touchstone for a great deal of discussion in the realm of international political economy since the latter part of the 1960s. The Gulf did become a wellhead in the post-World War II decades, not only for Europe, but for Japan and, by the early 1970s, North America as well.
