"With this book, Bob Vitalis tackles the geopolitical "truths" about oil: that US presence in the Gulf and our relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; that US oil independence is necessary to prevent foreign powers from controlling and limiting global supply; that only displays of force and threat of military action keep price inflation in check. As these axioms are repeated across policy and scholarly debates, sheer repetition is taken as evidence of fact. Vitalis explicates what work these false beliefs about oil and geopolitics do today in US policy and scholarship. We can either continue to remain fixed on the state's wholly unnecessary defense of access, or we can extricate ourselves from it and concentrate instead on oilcraft's all too real effects"--

Robert Vitalis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2007), named one of the best books of the year by the London Guardian and an essential read by Foreign Affairs, as well as White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (2015) and When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (1995).

1. Opening
2. Raw Materialism
3. 1973: A Time to Confuse
4. No Deal
5. Breaking the Spell