American Hegemony & World Oil*

Bromley's central argument is that U.S. hegemony has been and remains ``dependent upon a directive role'' in the international oil industry and that stability in the Persian Gulf is a vital basis for U.S. power. In this decidedly academic, virtually unreadable study (``the basic conceptual framework and methodological stance of neorealism is a combination of positivism and Waltzian systems theory'') the author describes how the U.S. established and consolidated control over the oil market. Challenging the theory that the rise of OPEC undermined the U.S.-dominated world oil order (``The decline of U.S. power is routinely exaggerated''), Bromley ( Thatcherism ) shows how the dominance has been ``refashioned'' as radical regimes, such as those in Iran, Libya and Iraq, challenged it. In a postscript written soon after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, he comments that Western control embodied a number of potentially explosive contradictions, not the least of which was the arming of local clients by the superpowers. Whatever the outcome of the current crisis, he maintains, ``the plain fact remains that the murderous regime crafted by Saddam sits in a cauldron of the West's making.'' (Feb.)