This 1977 report prepared for the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the United States Senate relates much of the history that affects international relations today.For the United States, access to secure supplies of foreign oil has become an increasingly vital policy goal with the decline of domestic production and our growing dependence on oil imports. This study evaluates the relationships between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the United States and Iran in terms of their contribution to access to oil.

The proximity of vast reserves of natural gas to the great energy-consuming markets of the world, the relative environmental harmlessness of gas, and its competitive price make the use of gas increasingly attractive to an energy-hungry world. Within the next two decades we will see the use of gas and gas-related technologies expand in industrialized nations as well as among developing countries. An international group of authorities on the political economy of natural gas analyzes the key factors influencing present gas supplies and uses and looks to the future, when new logistic systems and...

How can the industrialized countries reduce their vulnerability to supply disruptions caused by continued dependence on foreign sources of oil? How can access to Middle East oil be made more secure? These are the core questions that arise from a new worldwide energy situation in which the industrialized countries have remained dependent on oil and oil imports for their economic, political, and military well-being, while control of these resources has passed to an increasingly small number of less-developed countries whose interests do not automatically or necessarily coincide with those of...