A Crude Bargain: Great Powers, Oil States, and Petro-Alignment

Kim, Inwook

doi:10.1080/09636412.2019.1662478

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Most states in the international system are scarce in oil and depend on import from oil-rich territories, which makes them vulnerable to disruptions in the price and supply of oil. Although some scholars argue markets may adjust to these disruptions (Gholz and Press, 2010), others claim states devise anticipatory strategies to mitigate their effects, such as diversifying supplies (Downs, 2004), building strategic oil stockpiles (Victor and Eskreis-Winkler, 2008), regulating the oil industry (Lind and Press, 2018), forging partnerships with major oil-rich countries (Kim, 2019), and using military force to secure oil territory (Lee, 2022; Meierding, 2020) and supply routes (Glaser, 2013).…”

Section: Energy Security In Theory and Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…History is replete with examples of states forging strategies to alleviate their energy security concerns. States have deployed their militaries to oil-rich regions as Britain did in Mesopotamia during the First World War (Kelanic, 2020), forged cooperative security partnerships with oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia (Kim, 2019), and offered geopolitical assistance to facilitate energy deals abroad, as China has across South America and Africa (Lind and Press, 2018). Of course, policymakers—not unitary states—are the ones making these decisions and they are not always immediately aware of their state’s energy security interests in foreign territories, leading to abrupt shifts in energy security policy, in which policymakers take an interest in a territory after periods of prolonged neglect—as exemplified by the sudden U.S. interest in securing oil in the Caspian Sea in 1997 (Jaffe, 2001; Randall, 2005), the Indian Ocean in 2001 (Fox, 2004), and the Gulf of Guinea in 2006 (Coll, 2012).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…I illustrate these insights through a study of US lend-lease assistance to Saudi Arabia in 1943, when President Roosevelt declared that the “preservation of the independence and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia was vital to the defense of the United States.” 1 I focus on the lend-lease decision because IR scholars consider US–Saudi relations to be paradigmatic of how states set strategies based on the desire to control oil (Croteau and Poast, 2020: 134–137; Kelanic, 2020: Ch. 6; Kim, 2019: 857–861; Layne, 2007: 45–48), and historians identify the lend-lease decision as the beginning of this relationship (Anderson, 1981: 46–48; Bronson, 2008: 24; Miller, 1980: 70–71; Yergin, 2008: 376–379). It included millions of dollars in gold, silver, trucks, medical supplies, textiles, agricultural machinery, and radio equipment (McFarland, 2020: 38–39; Yaqub, 2016: 24), and provided the steppingstone upon which US relations with Saudi Arabia broadened into a security partnership (Colgan, 2021: 137; Gresh, 2015: 21–36).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Discovering the prize: information, lobbying, and the origins of US–Saudi security relations

Evers

2022

European Journal of International Relations

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How do policymakers discover their energy security interests abroad? Conventional wisdom assumes states have an inherent interest in securing an affordable and steady supply of oil. In this paper, I show that policymakers often fail to realize such vital interests on their own. Instead, multinational actors like international oil corporations (IOCs) educate policymakers on their state’s security interests abroad. By integrating prior scholarship on corporate power with insights on lobbying in American politics, I theorize that multinational corporations like IOCs can influence security policy when two conditions are met: first, policymakers demand information on security policy because of issue complexities, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and structural holes in the international system; and second, these corporations possess social ties that grant them the access, trust, and legitimacy to supply those policymakers with information. In the context of energy security, IOCs provide information on foreign sources of oil, threats posed to access, and anticipatory strategies for protecting access. I apply the theory to the origins of U.S. lend-lease aid to Saudi Arabia in 1943. Through sequential analysis, process-tracing, and comparative counterfactual reasoning, I argue an American IOC hastened U.S. interests in securing Saudi oil by using its ties to lobby the Roosevelt Administration at a time when the Administration lacked information on the country. The theory and findings broaden the state-centric view of energy security, contribute new evidence to historiography on US–Saudi relations, and fill an important gap in our understanding of corporate lobbying in security policy.

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Section: Energy Security In Theory and Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Discovering the prize: information, lobbying, and the origins of US–Saudi security relations

Evers

2022

European Journal of International Relations

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“…The critical importance of energy resources to powerful countries makes them have a different attitude towards resource-rich countries than that towards other countries. In order to ensure a sustainable energy supply, industrialised countries often build a tight relationship with resource exporting countries or the countries where their multinational corporations operate, for example, by forming a 'petro-alignment' (Kim, 2019). This is especially the case during the Cold War when superpower rivalry was intense and access to raw materials was critically important (Hendrix, 2018).…”

Section: Countrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Petro-friends: Foreign ownership of oil and leadership survival

Lee

2021

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations

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The resource curse literature shows that natural resources, particularly oil, help regime or leadership survival, but it also suggests that resource-rich countries are prone to civil wars or political instability. This article argues that the ownership structure of the oil sector matters and influences leadership survival. Specifically, foreign ownership of the oil sector raises leaders’ survival prospect and leads to more military interventions aimed to help the leader. Using data on oil ownership and leaders from 1962 to 2006 across 120 developing countries, this article finds that foreign involvement in the oil sector has a negative effect on leadership turnover. Countries with deeper foreign involvement in the oil sector are also more likely to experience military interventions on the side of the leaders. In other words, leaders of oil-producing countries do receive political support when they cooperate with and serve as ‘petro-friends’ to foreign powers.

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“…Certainly, US oil prices are affected by these events on a global scale. However, explaining signals of reassurance based solely on preconceived notions such as the US-Saudi "oil for security" deal 7 or petro-alignment (Kim 2019) would be insufficient and partially inconsistent with empirical evidence. Regarding US-Saudi relations, we adopt a stance that takes US energy abundance into account.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Biden Administration’s Policy Towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2021–2022

Stevanović¹

2023

The Review of International Affairs

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This paper addresses the question of the Biden administration's policy towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with special regard to the reasons for the US decision to send strong signals of reassurance in 2022 after the initial deterioration in their relations. This paper's main hypothesis posits that the US overall implemented a hybrid strategy towards its Gulf partner, but there were different constellations of coercive and accommodative elements to it in different time frames. It draws on Jeffrey Taliaferro's theory of intraalliance politics, which examines great power patrons' strategies towards allies and partners based on the administration's perception of the regional power distribution, the assessment of the threat level and time horizon for its actualization, as well as the presence of domestic constraints. In the case of this paper, it was contended that the Biden administration perceived a mostly unfavourable power distribution in the Middle East and that the initial perception of a long threat horizon was replaced by uncertainty, stemming from the indirect effects of the Russia-Ukraine war on the Persian Gulf. These variables, combined with the high domestic opposition of Congress to accommodating Saudi Arabia, can explain the resulting hybrid strategy. The method of congruence analysis was used in this paper to test the observable manifestations of the hypothesis.

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A Crude Bargain: Great Powers, Oil States, and Petro-Alignment

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Discovering the prize: information, lobbying, and the origins of US–Saudi security relations

Discovering the prize: information, lobbying, and the origins of US–Saudi security relations

Petro-friends: Foreign ownership of oil and leadership survival

The Biden Administration’s Policy Towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2021–2022

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