The nature of the U.S. commitment to Persian Gulf security, the scale of the U.S. engagement, and the size of the region’s resources led to a widespread view that the United States itself was heavily dependent on the Mideast. Yet in 2008, even before shale oil, imports from the Gulf amounted to less than 20 percent of total U.S. oil imports. As already noted, oil sands in the province of Alberta had made Canada the largest supplier of U.S. imports by far. In 2019, only about 11 percent of U.S. imports came from the Persian Gulf. For their part, Gulf producers are focused on Asia as their most
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