Miguel Afonso Caetano"I once called the Saudi kingdom the true fifty-first state of the American Union, a de facto status that it held before the Israeli state was even born. The kingdom and the whole Gulf region have been and remain at the center of US imperial strategy in the Eastern Hemisphere, pace countless attempts to outsmart common wisdom by explaining that “it is not about oil” or “not only about oil.” Commenting on the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Former Federal Reserve chairperson Alan Greenspan wondered in his memoir why “it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil.”
Of course, being about oil is not only — or even not primarily for Washington — about US access to Iraqi or Gulf oil. It is about controlling the huge amount of oil money detained by the Gulf states (their sovereign wealth funds own over $3 trillion in assets, close to 40 percent of the world’s total held in such funds) and benefiting from their considerable purchasing power, especially in funding the US military-industrial complex. It is also about controlling other states’ access to Gulf hydrocarbons. As David Harvey aptly put it once, “whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future.”
This also shows how mistaken have been the many who believed that the surge of shale hydrocarbon production in the United States, combined with the rise of China’s power, meant that the Middle East has lost its importance for Washington. Much of this kind of deluded commentary was poured over the Obama administration’s famous “pivot to Asia.” What such comments completely overlooked is that controlling the Gulf “oil spigot” is crucial for the US strategy toward China, about half of whose oil imports originate from the Gulf."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/us-imperialism-mena-war-oil-economy
