It's very common to scaremonger people with "oh no! what if the government of country X, a key source of resource Y, were to be replaced by one less friendly to the United States?" This needs to be challenged.
For this to be a real threat, the "hostile" government would have to be so "hostile" that they would rather destroy the resource in question, or leave it in the ground, rather than sell it on the world market. There's one world market for oil. Either they sell the oil, or they don't. If they sell it, it makes no difference whether they like the United States or not.
It could be argued that Saudi Arabia could be more of a price hawk than it is, given its reserves. It's not clear how much difference this would really make, because although they do care about what the U.S. government thinks, they don't always bend to the U.S. on the price question and they are also motivated by other considerations in not wanting the price to go too high (e.g. not creating too big a motivation for substitution.) The difference in price caused by a plausibly more hawkish Saudi policy would not result in an "energy crisis" in this country, unless you think a slightly higher price for oil constitutes a "crisis."
At 08:47 AM 7/2/2004 -0400, you wrote:
Ironically, I attended a lecture given by Paul Roberts recently. He wrote a book called "The End of Oil". Though I haven't read the book, one of the points he made was that Saudi Arabia provides the United States with more oil than any other country. According to Yahoo, that's about 17.8%. Roberts explained that if the Saudi regime were replaced by a one hostile to the U.S., or if terrorists attacked Saudi Arabian oil facilities, either resulting in the elimination of Saudi Arabian oil from the U.S. economy, there would be an energy crisis in this country like we have never seen. So, whether we like it or not, it's in our country's best interest right now to be friendly to Saudi Arabia.
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