This is a course on the global political-economy of oil and its connection and basis in the Middle East and North African oil-producing states. We first examine the facts about global oil resources and infrastructures, including reserves, demand, productive capacity, depletion rates, price history, and the persistence of oil as the basis of transportation everywhere.

From this basis, we explore the international oil system, including the oil-producing nations' OPEC cartel, and the First-World consumers' International Energy Agency (IEA) cartel; the special role of IEA members' strategic oil reserves; of Saudi Arabia as an "oil-price swing state"; and the roles of Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the UAE, as well as, to a leser extent, that of Russia, the Caspian Basin, and of Latin American and African producers.

We then examine the phases of US global oil strategy since WWII and the issue of US predominant influence (hegemony) in the oil system, and the construction and reconstruction of American hegemony in MENA states, and especially the Persian Gulf. This includes the period after the 1973 embargo, the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq-sanctions regime, and the occupation of Iraq, followed by OPEC joining with the US-IEA to form the "Permanent Secretariat" of the International Energy Forum-a major step in energy globalization.

We examine the emerging crises in the global oil system, including China's exploding oil demand which threatens cheap oil and its addictive hold over the oil-poor EU, Japan, and China. We see how the Cheney Energy Plan is pressing all oil-producing nations to accept large private investments to expand production, for transparency, and to establish a new level of global market-control institutions.

We end by soberly examining the consequences of the current global oil system for fighting global warming, and for retarding transportation-infrastructure modernization within the US and its main economic rivals-increasingly oil- and automobile-addicted consuming states which lack domestic oil supplies-the EU Japan, India and China.

- Requirements: readings, seminar participation, research groups, research paper.

Grading: