"The real story of global oil over the past twenty-five years is not about the spillover effects of Palestinians fighting Israelis, or terrorist attacks on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or Iraq's stormy relationship with Kuwait. It is not even about periodic small- and large-scale U.S. attacks on Iraq. Rather, the real story is about longer-term developments that have changed the international relations of the Middle East, politics at the global level, and world oil markets. These developments have increased oil stability." from the Introduction

Thirty years after OAPEC...

Great powers and grand strategies. It is easy to assume that the most powerful nations pursue and employ consistent, cohesive, and decisive policies in trying to promote their interests in regions of the world. Popular theory emphasizes two such grand strategies that great powers may pursue: balance of power policy or hegemonic domination. But, as Steve A. Yetiv contends, things may not always be that cut and dried.

Analyzing the evolution of the United States' foreign policy in the Persian Gulf from 1972 to 2005, Yetiv offers a provocative and panoramic view of American strategies...

Steve A. Yetiv has developed an interdisciplinary, integrated approach to studying foreign policy decisions, which he applies here to understand better how and why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and 2003.

Yetiv's innovative method employs the rational actor, cognitive, domestic politics, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics models to explain the foreign policy behavior of governments. Drawing on the widest set of primary sources to date--including a trove of recently declassified documents--and on interviews with key actors, he applies these models to...

In The Petroleum Triangle, Steve A. Yetiv tells the interconnected story of oil, globalization, and terrorism. Yetiv asks how Al-Qaeda, a small band of terrorists, became such a real and perceived threat to American and global security, a threat viewed as profound enough to motivate the strongest power in world history to undertake extraordinary actions, including two very costly wars.

Yetiv argues that Middle East oil and globalization have combined to augment the real and perceived threat of transnational terrorism. Globalization has allowed terrorists to do things that...

Walmart and "Made in China" are practically synonymous; Walmart imports some 70 percent of its merchandise from China. Walmart is now also rapidly becoming a major retail presence there, with close to two hundred Walmarts in more than a hundred Chinese cities. What happens when the world's biggest retailer and the world's biggest country do business with each other? In this book, a group of thirteen experts from several disciplines examine the symbiotic but strained relationship between these giants. The book shows how Walmart began cutting costs by bypassing its American suppliers and...

This edited volume breaks new ground by innovatively drawing on multiple disciplines to enhance our understanding of international relations and conflict. The expansion of knowledge across disciplines and the increasingly blurred boundaries in the real world both enable and demand thinking across intellectual borders. While multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary are prominent buzz words, remarkably few books advance them. Yet doing so can sharpen and expand our perspective on academic and real world issues and problems. This book offers the most comprehensive treatment to date and is an...

Few issues in international affairs and energy security animate thinkers more than the classic topic of hegemony, and the case of the Persian Gulf presents particularly fertile ground for considering this concept. Since the 1970s, the region has undergone tumultuous changes, with dramatic shifts in the diplomatic, military, and economic roles of the United States, China, and Russia. In this book, Steve A. Yetiv and Katerina Oskarsson offer a panoramic study of hegemony and foreign powers in the Persian Gulf, offering the most comprehensive, data-driven portrait to date of their evolving...