In 1974, a year after the end of the Yom Kippur war, the German-born US political scientist Dankwart Rustow surveyed the implications of the conflict for Foreign Policy magazine. Remarking that the Arab-Israeli “fronts” in the wider conflict were dormant, he noted, however, the huge and continuing impact of the war, not least in the ongoing repercussions of Opec’s oil embargo – the so-called “oil weapon” that had been aimed by Arab oil producers at supporters of Israel, including the US, shocking the global economy.
Its impact, Rustow assessed, had “spread inexorably to aggravate all previous problems of the world’s economy … spreading ripples of [an] oil war engulfing the entire world”.
