religious conservatism in the Middle East and as the potential financial engine for modernizing the Arabs. Were Riyadh's wealth to come under the control of a pro-Egyptian, Soviet-aligned regime, the global balance of power could have shifted.

Thus, Saudi and U.S. interests aligned. The Saudis, increasingly under pressure in the Arab world from radical regimes, needed Washington to guarantee their security. The United States needed to block the rise of Arab radicalism. Washington constructed a Middle Eastern strategy built mainly around Israel, the Shah's Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In retrospect, the Arab oil embargo and the dramatic increase in oil prices following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was not entirely detrimental to the United States. Whatever the economic impact, the rise in oil prices increased Saudi Arabia's power in the Arab world and helped turn the tide on Arab radicalism.

Even as such radicalism declined, a new force emerged to bind the United States and the Saudis closer together. The Iranian revolution, which combined republicanism with Islamic fundamentalism in a Shiite form, frightened the Saudis as much as the secular radicals had. Both the United

States and Saudi Arabia were obsessed with containing this new movement.

One of the mechanisms for containing Iran was Iraq. Their war in the 1980s was not unwelcome by either Washington or Riyadh, as it kept Tehran occupied. But the outcome of the war was less agreeable, since it deeply weakened Iran and left Iraq as the dominant native power in the Persian Gulf, a position it quickly exploited in its invasion of Kuwait.

Here, U.S. and Saudi interests again coincided. The United States did not want Iraq to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and control a