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Book Reviews: Politics and Nature
The Petroleum Triangle: Oil, Globalization, and Terror is an interesting but also a frustrating book. The book demonstrates the advantages of an in-depth investigation of one case but also illustrates the disadvantages when one pushes the theoretical conclusions drawn from the single case study a little too far. At the same time, Steve Yetiv does a good job of showing how globalizing technologies have changed the global security calculus and how America's attachment to Middle East oil comes at a high price. Yetiv's goal is to investigate how Al-Qaeda was able to become such a large threat to the United States and to have such a large impact on America's view of the world and her behavior. His answer focuses on the interactions between oil and globalization and how these have facilitated transnational terrorism in new and dangerous ways. Yetiv argues that oil is the key enabler of Al Qaeda and other extremists in the Middle East and that the technological tools associated with globalization have allowed Al Qaeda to operate on a global scale that would not have been possible 30 years ago.
Yetiv identifies oil as a multifaceted culprit in the empowerment of Al Qaeda. He points out that oil was a key factor in inspiring the United States to support repressive regimes in the Middle East--thus creating a wellspring of grievance. As I will discuss later, he also argues in contradictory fashion that Al Qaeda's grievances against the US are a result of a "distorted religious prism" (p. 76). According to Yetiv, oil both spurred a regional anger that Al Qaeda was able to tap into, and served as a key resource in funding the growth of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in its earlier years and...