TOWARDS THE end of the second world war Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a fateful gathering of world leaders that helped determine the course of geopolitics for decades. No, not the Yalta summit. Immediately after FDR, Churchill and Stalin had carved up the world into spheres of influence, the American president slipped away onto an American naval vessel to meet quietly with Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia. In return for protection of the Sauds’ sovereignty in the Holy Land, the monarch agreed to grant American oil firms access to his country’s petroleum.
Building on the long-standing exploitation of Persian reserves by the Anglo-Persian
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