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 facilitating the creation of a safe haven that was exploited to such a great effect in Afghanistan. Yetiv makes a strong case that the growing interconnection of the world was a key facilitator of Al Qaeda's power to inflict damage and to market its anti-American message. In other words, oil increased the resources of Al Qaeda and globalization lowered the costs of exploiting those resources to inflict damage and market itself globally. Thus Yetiv argues that the best way for us to understand 9/11 and the impact of Al Qaeda is by understanding the dangerous situation created by mixing Middle East oil with the changes brought by globalization.

Yetiv does a good job of providing evidence for what he calls the “butterfly effect” (p. 189) of globalization and how such things as the internet and air travel facilitated terrorist coordination. While Yetiv focuses primarily on Al Qaeda as the main actor of interest, he also provides very strong evidence of the baleful effects of Saudi Arabia's oil wealth and its extremist state ideology, which combined to fund the Taliban and the antecedents of Al Qaeda. Yetiv is convincing when he describes the powerful incubation power of oil in the hands of the Saudi government. Yetiv also makes very clear the high costs that the United States has incurred—and will continue to incur—through its dependence and that of its allies on Middle Eastern oil.

Despite these strong points the book also has some important weaknesses. One of the key problems with the book is that Yetiv pushes too hard to sell oil as the primary enabler of terrorism. Al Qaeda was enabled by Saudi funding but other terrorist organizations have been enabled by all sorts of governments drawing on different resources, and moreover, other dangerous terrorist organizations have been able to fund themselves without being dependent on oil or on state governments sustained by oil. As Yetiv himself acknowledges: “Oil money has not been important to the terrorist acts themselves … Nor is oil money critical to particular elements of the infrastructure of terrorism … ” (p. 6). In some ways Yetiv treats oil as the hammer to hit every (theoretical) terrorist nail. This is particularly true when he argues that oil is a key facilitator of WMD terrorism. Yetiv starts to talk about how oil is facilitating nuclear proliferation by states like Iran, but this does not mean that oil as a resource is specifically tied to the danger of nuclear terrorism. Pakistan—a state unlike Iran that already has nuclear weapons but no oil—has a large terrorist problem and serious nuclear security issues of its own. Yetiv conjectures that terrorists could “use oil money to buy nuclear material” (p. 128). True, but terrorists could also use drug or diamond money. Yetiv seems to be trying too hard here. He also seems to be pushing for the key causal factor to be oil when one could make an equally strong argument that the key causal factor in accounting for the empowerment of Al Qaeda was not the oil but the willingness of the state sponsor to use its resources (in this case oil but in other cases it could be some other resource) to support the organization. Indeed, one of Yetiv's major contributions is a clear concise outline of how damaging decades of Saudi state policy funded by oil has been for the United States.

Another shortcoming of the book is Yetiv's argument that the anger directed at the United States by Al Qaeda and its supporters is due to “oil related issues, viewed largely through a distorted religious prism” (p. 76). Yetiv argues that the Manichean view of Al Qaeda and its distorted Islamist ideology was the key motivator for its anger at the United States, allowing Al Qaeda and its supporters to ignore all the good that America has done in the Muslim world. Al Qaeda portrayed the United States as helping “… a few greedy and corrupt families … who serve American interests … ” to control all the oil of the Middle East for their personal gain (p. 73). While it is true that Al Qaeda did use this trope as a marketing tool, the view that the United States has supported several corrupt and repressive regimes for its own economic and strategic benefit does not, to this reader, seem to be an unrealistic interpretation of reality given America's support for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and (the Shah's) Iran. America's behavior in the Middle East is one of the reasons why lots of Middle Easterners—including many who are opponents of Al Qaeda and everything Bin Laden stood for—are not necessarily big fans of the United States of America. I think Yetiv's attribution of anger at the United States to a distorted perspective unnecessarily weakens his case and limits his ability to fully analyze how decades of American policy in the Middle East are also part of the nexus that empowered Al Qaeda and led to the attacks on 9/11.

Overall though, the book makes a useful contribution to our understanding of how oil wealth in Saudi hands and American dependence on that oil combined with globalizing technologies to empower Al Qaeda. In shedding light on the sources of such a world-changing organization, Yetiv's book also raises important questions about America's policies in the region.