What had begun as an effort to subsidize a military alliance with American crude had devolved into a bloated, unsustainable, and above all expensive mess that the Americans themselves were now economically dependent upon. With the Cold War’s end, the Americans may have wanted to take a less active role in global affairs, they may have wanted to disengage, but a single global oil price meant that doing so would risk instability, supply shortages, and oil prices so high as to wreck the American economy. The Americans had become economically trapped in their own outdated security policy.
