It was not only the end of the war that pointed to a new era. So did the changing relationship between oil exporting and the consuming countries. The great contentious question of sovereignty had been resolved; the exporters owned the oil. What came to matter for them over the 1980s was sure access to markets. When the producing countries discovered that consumers had more flexibility and wider choices than had been imagined, they came to see that “security of demand” was no less important to them than was “security of supply” to the consumers. Most of the exporters now wanted to establish
...more
