Oil, US empire, and the Middle East -- The road to the oil shock -- Pursuing petrodollar interdependence -- The triangle to the Nile -- The petrodollar economy -- Visions of petrodollar promise and peril -- Reform and revolt -- Revolution and invasions -- Recoveries and crises -- End of an era.

We study the efficacy of releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) within the context of fully specified models of the global oil market that explicitly allow for storage demand as well as unanticipated changes in the SPR. Using novel identifying strategies and evaluation methods,...