ABSTRACT
By 1975 the United States, conscious of the imminent likelihood of the enormous strains on the western system as a result of the revolution in the world of oil power over the previous five years, had had to reverse its earlier policy of seeking cooperation with the O.P.E.C. countries as a means of securing a more competitive energy situation for its own consumers and as a device for making the Middle East more secure (see above, pp. 224–5). Instead it began to see confrontation as the required, indeed the only, alternative. The formation of the International Energy Agency (I.E.A.) by the United States was related to this policy aim. It was constituted as a means whereby the world’s rich oil-importing nations’ strategies and tactics towards O.P.E.C. and the challenge of high prices for, and politically restrained supplies of, oil could be coordinated and strengthened. Even the stronger option of a military solution was examined and appears to have been rejected mainly because it would have required unacceptable collusion with the Soviet Union. Such collusion was not an impossible development, given the fact that economic development in the U.S.S.R. depended, then and now, on the continuation of a prosperous western world. Thus, the Soviet Union’s analysts might well have suggested that, as such a prosperous western world was becoming impossible with the continuing oil crisis, the idea of the overthrow of O.P.E.C. and/or individual members of the organization ought not to be opposed. From the west’s point of view, however, the military solution would have undoubtedly brought in its wake more serious problems than those it solved, as it would also have led to a generalization of the Third World countries’ disillusion with the western system, and so closed the ranks of such nations in support of O.P.E.C.
