Oil Diplomacy Quotes

Look, I don't think President Obama would have bowed to the ruler of Saudi Arabia if he didn't have oil to the degree that the Saudis do. I think they and other producing states, almost all of whom, except Norway and Canada, are dictatorships or autocratic systems, have thrown their weight around because of oil.

Show this administration an oil well, and it will show you a foreign policy.

American oil operations are, for all practical purposes, instruments of our foreign policy.

We will never again permit any foreign nation to have Uncle Sam over a barrel of oil.

Bin Laden was completely protected by the oil companies in this country who told [President] Bush not to go after him because it would piss off the Saudis.

The Iranians know they hold high cards because of oil.

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person.

The Gulf War was a clear precedent as well, and it let us begin to understand how the US government would go to war to secure strategic oil reserves and potential markets.

You can't have anything happening today within the petro-monarchies, is going to be too risky for the United States and the oil interests there.

In truth, every American administration since that of Franklin D. Roosevelt has maintained close ties with the Saudi rulers, and for a single, simple reason: oil.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

used as oil to smooth the troubled water of our aggressive commercial policy