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Life in middle east before oil7/22/2023 Moreover, many commentators, frustrated with the tension in relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, have stepped up calls for weaning the United States of foreign oil broadly and of Middle Eastern oil in particular. ![]() Two central questions have been whether the United States needs to have a military presence in the region at all and whether our primary aim has been to defend Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states with whom we now discover we have serious policy disagreements. This seeming revelation has recently provoked a debate in Washington, one focused especially on Saudi Arabia, which alone holds a quarter of the world’s known oil reserves. That the region is vitally important, however, does not automatically lead to the conclusion that a large military presence is required there-or to serious questions about the continued availability of this oil on the world market. For that reason the United States and the West have continued to define the region as being vitally important. Although the Middle East produces a quarter of world oil supplies, it holds between two-thirds and three-quarters of all known oil reserves. In a way, all the scrambling to develop resources around the world today is intended to delay the day of reckoning. And once again, Western oil companies and political strategists are showing greater interest in the region as it embarks on a project to build a new pipeline through Georgia and Turkey into the Mediterranean, pumping a million barrels a day in the hope of further reducing the impact of OPEC on the oil markets and meeting projected increases in oil demand.īut there is no escaping that the region that has grabbed the greatest global attention during the past half century in matters of oil, the Middle East, remains critical for future energy supplies. Still relatively poor and underdeveloped, and environmentally one of the most devastated in the world, it now sees its salvation once again in the promise of newly discovered oil reserves. ![]() ![]() Today, the region has little to show for it. Half a century ago, the battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest of World War II, was fought in large part over who controlled those vast oil supplies. A recent visit to the city of Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea called to mind that a century ago, the Caspian region held half the world oil supplies.
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