Quincy Pact — FDR meets King Saud
On February 14, 1945, returning from the Yalta Conference, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal's Great Bitter Lake. The two-day meeting — never fully documented — produced an informal agreement that became the bedrock of U.S.-Saudi relations: American security guarantees and military protection in exchange for Saudi oil access at favorable terms. Saudi Arabia's recoverable reserves had been confirmed by California Standard's 1938 Dammam No. 7 well; the country was about to become the world's largest oil holder. The Quincy meeting locked the U.S. into the Saudi defense relationship that has continued for eighty years.
Roosevelt died two months later, before any of the Quincy understandings could be formalized in treaty. The relationship survived because both successor administrations (Truman in the U.S., Saud and his sons in Saudi Arabia) found it useful and continued operating on its terms. The most consequential foreign-policy commitment of the 20th-century United States was made by a dying president in an undocumented two-day meeting.
03 · Black Gold
Oil arrived as a curiosity — a medicine, a lamp fuel, a substitute for whale oil — and within fifty years had become the most strategic commodity on Earth. The first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. By 1911 a single American family controlled most of the world's refined oil. By 1914 the British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil at Churchill's insistence, and the country with the best oil reserves was no longer Britain. The 20th century is, in plain economic terms, the century the energy capital moved from Tyneside to Texas — and from Texas, eventually, to Riyadh.
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