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.

Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...