Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies. Arab petro-states could not target individual nations, the energy analyst Michael Lynch told me, because national oil companies sell oil and gas to what is, in effect, a single worldwide pool controlled by middlemen. Any embargo thus could only raise prices equally across the planet, rather than striking at a single nation. Or, rather, the Arabs couldn’t have targeted a single nation if President Richard Nixon had not imposed price caps on U.S. oil and gas two years before as an
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