From here:
Once Iranian “successful defiance” was terminated, and the “clear-eyed” Shah was safely installed in power, Iran became a pillar of U.S. control of the Middle East, along with Saudi Arabia and post-1967 Israel, which was closely allied with the Shah’s Iran, though not formally. Israel also had shared interests with Saudi Arabia, a relationship now becoming more overt as the Trump administration oversees an alliance of reactionary Middle East states as a base for U.S. power in the region.
Control of the strategically significant Middle East, with its huge and easily accessible oil reserves, has been a centerpiece of policy since the U.S. gained the position of global hegemon after World War II. The reasons are not obscure. The State Department recognized that Saudi Arabia is “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Eisenhower described it as the most “strategically important part of the world.” That control of Middle East oil yields “substantial control of the world” and “critical leverage” over industrial rivals has been understood by influential statesmen from Roosevelt adviser A. A. Berle to Zbigniew Brzezinski.
These principles hold quite independently of U.S. access to the region’s resources, which, in fact, has not been of primary concern. Through much of this period the U.S. was a major producer of fossil fuels, as it is again today. But the principles remain the same, and are reinforced by other factors, among them the insatiable demand of the oil dictatorships for military equipment and the Saudi agreement to support the dollar as global currency, affording the U.S. major advantages.
Middle East correspondent Tom Stevenson does not exaggerate when he writes that, “The U.S.’s inherited mastery of the Gulf has given it a degree of leverage over both rivals and allies probably unparalleled in the history of empire… It is difficult to overstate the role of the Gulf in the way the world is currently run.”
It is, then, understandable why successful defiance in the region cannot be tolerated.
I don't understand how this "control" works. I actually asked Noam what he meant by this here and I didn't get a clear answer (in my opinion) about how exactly this control manifests and how exactly it works in terms of concrete leverage:
Me: You say that the basis of all this insanity is the need to control Middle East oil. But Saudi Arabian oil goes to market and anyone can buy it. So in what sense is that control?
NC: But the US wants to have influence over where it goes. The US had exactly the same policies when it wasn't using a drop of Saudi Arabian oil, and it was the biggest producer in the world, in the 1950s. In fact, in the late '50s, as you may know, under Eisenhower, there was a decision made by the government not to use cheap Saudi oil, but instead to use expensive Texas oil, which meant emptying out the reserves in the United States, and enriching Texas oil-producers, at the same time undermining US security. That went on for 14 years.
Me: Right. But what I mean is, you often say that they have "veto power" or "hand on the spigot."
NC: That was George Kennan.
Me: Right. You often quote those remarks. But in what sense...
NC: If the United States has control--substantial control--over where oil goes, which it does, that is a threat to Japan and Europe, which would need the oil.
Me: Right, but does the US have control over that?
NC: Substantial control. I mean, Saudi Arabia relies very heavily on the United States. I mean, the $60 billion of arms that we send them is toys for the ruling elite. They can get something from France, but nothing like from the United States. In other respects too, being a client of the most powerful country in world history is different from being a client of France.
Me: I understand that the close relationship allows very lucrative military contracts. But what I don't understand is in what sense that entails control given that the dictators sell it to whoever buys it, you know.
NC: They don't. They can be limited by, and sometimes are, by what the US demands. And we have that threat over them. For example, if we didn't want them to do something, they'd have to listen. And Europe and Japan know that.
NC mentions this "leverage," but I want to know the concrete examples/manifestations/mechanisms of how that leverage is used.
Did we ever threaten to cut off Japan and thereby coerce Japan to do something, for example?
Did we ever use Gulf-control to coerce Europe, for example? To what end? In what exact way?
Or is the "leverage" rather some "background" thing that never gets used but always looms in the background?
American influence over Middle Eastern oil exporters in the 20th century was minimal, and to the extent that it did exist, it was entirely accidental. Noam Chomsky, who is not a trained historian or economist but a linguist, is frequently criticized by actual economists and historians for his over-simplistic, conspiratorial, and reductionistic viewpoints.
The United States throughout the 20th century had almost no control over the world's main energy exporters. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74 proved that the United States' influence over its supposed Middle Eastern partners was limited. Even the Shah of Iran, who came to power in a US-backed coup, proved unreliable and refused to increase energy production so that he could fuel his own economic projects, which were a critical part of his PR and internal agenda. 7 years after the oil embargo, major oil producer Iraq invaded another major oil producer, Iran. The United States could do little to stop the outbreak of this conflict which led to another spike in world oil prices, despite increasing reliance of Iraq in 1982 and beyond on financing from countries Noam Chomsky would have us believe were US satellites, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In 1991, the United States again failed to control a supposed "dependency", which resulted in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Indeed, if the United States was ever the puppetmaster of the Middle East, it will go down in history as the most incompetent overlord that ever existed.
The reality is that the US has almost no control over its Middle Eastern partners, even those with active US bases in them and those that are "dependent" on American arms. I'll first touch on arms sales - the relationship between buyer and seller of arms is symbiotic and at any point there is more than one main vendor of modern arms. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the United States' main competitor and for decade-long periods at a time outsold the US in volumes of arms sales. From 1991 to 1998, Russia and Ukraine remained the United States' main competitors in the international arms market. Arms sales are a business relationship like any other, and buyers do have considerable power. For example, the Iraqi Air Force in the 1980s twice changed its primary supplier, due to factionalism: in the Iraqi Air Force, there existed a MiG faction and a Mirage faction who both bickered over which country produced the best modern fighter pilots. When the United States refused to sell Egypt modern armaments, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser purchased Soviet arms through Czechoslovakia. Finally, even under international arms embargo - which would seem to be the epitome of "sellers' leverage" in the arms market - countries like Rhodesia and Iran managed to improvise through a combination of black market trades and home-grown arms sales. Numerous black market arms suppliers existed throughout the 20th century - countries like Rwanda, Uganda, and the DR Congo, who were anxious to cover up their arms transactions as to not be accused of mis-appropriating development aid channeled transactions through entities like North Korea and Victor Bout. The economics of the arms business are interesting, but largely no different than those of any other state-state transactions - the general rule is that "where there is a will, there is a supplier".
To outline the relationship with Saudi Arabia in particular, the United States has had almost zero "control" over the country, though they did craft a successful partnership throughout the Cold War. Besides the 1973 oil embargo, Saudi Arabia has taken other steps that went directly against US interests. Namely, Saudi Arabia continued funding the Afghan Mujahideen, and their successor, the Pakistani-supported Taliban long after the United States stopped doing so due to Soviet withdrawal. Saudi Arabia additionally financed the Pakistani nuclear program, with the understanding that it would at least partially be used as protection for Saudi Arabia in the event of a conflict with Iran. All these actions, taken against the will of the United States, are for one simple reason - Saudi Arabia is no one's proxy. The modern history of the country begins with the creation of the Wahhabi sect by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who created a pact with Muhammad bin Saud to spread Saudi power and the Wahhabi creed throughout the Arabian peninsula. Under the reign of Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman, commonly known as Ibn Saud, the mission of the bin Saud dynasty was accomplished as they created the largest state in the Arabian peninsula following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its Rashidi proxy in Arabia. The British, who had supplied ibn Saud with arms, expected that he would be a compliant proxy, but when seeking a foreign partner to provide expertise for his oil company, Ibn Saud chose the United States. In doing so, Saudi Arabia proved that it was capable of uniquely independent action that defied the expectations of its backers.
Finally, to address the idea that the United States could influence its industrial "rivals" through control of Middle Eastern oil, the idea is completely preposterous, mainly because there are numerous energy reserves outside the Middle East. Venezuela, Russia, and Nigeria all possess considerable energy reserves. For most of the latter half of the 20th century, the United States's sole geopolitical adversary was the Soviet Union, which was one of the largest energy exporters in the world.
There is no doubt that the US has intervened extensively in the Middle East. That said, "oil" is not the reason. Behind every intervention, from Operation Ajax in 1953 to the Lebanese intervention to the bombing of Libya, there was always a strong political or security rationale behind American action. In some cases, as in the case of the airstrikes on Libya, it was in response to state-sponsored terror. In others, like Operation Ajax or the intervention in Lebanon, it was to contain the spread of Soviet or Nasserist influence. I am in no way saying these motivations were noble or selfless, but they were not related to control of oil, and any control of oil that resulted was just a by-product. Through these interventions, the US accumulated significant clout over the Middle East, but every one of them was reactive, not proactive - the US sought to retaliate for something or stop someone, not to change the hierarchy of powers in the region. US policy in the Middle East up until 1998 consisted of constantly "putting out fires", with no overall objective other than to empower the militaries of its allies - namely Israel, the Shah, and Turkey - to dominate their enemies.
Sources:
Swearingen, Will. Geopolitical Origins of the Iran-Iraq War.
Cooper, Tom. Great Lakes Conflagration: The Second Congo War 1998-2003.
Spiller, Roger. "Not War but Like War": The American Intervention in Lebanon.
Book, Timothy. NATO's Air War in Libya: A Template for Future American Operations
Vassiliev, Alexei. The History of Saudi Arabia.
Tetreault, Mary Ann. The Political Economy of Middle Eastern Oil.
Mann, Yosi. The Middle East and the New Era in the World Oil Market.
Smith, Ron. The Economics of Exporting Arms.
Amanat, Abbas. Iran: A Modern History.