Ahmed Mahdi's Energy and US Foreign Policy is an examination of America's post-Cold War foreign oil policy. He states in his introduction that his work is an extension of the analyses of William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko – which characterized American foreign policy as the pursuit of an “open door” for American economic interests – to the specific field of energy resources. Whilst the title implies that this is a study of post-Cold war policy, it is in reality a study of the policies of the administration of George W. Bush. The first chapter does survey the policies of the elder Bush and Bill Clinton, but the next three chapters all focus on the second Bush administration. Mahdi rationalizes this focus by claiming that the importance of oil to the maintenance of the US “empire” rose to new heights under George W. Bush and that no previous administration had made the securing of foreign oil so central to its foreign policy. Whilst the securing of oil and gas is at the core of the argument, however, Mahdi seeks to place that goal in the context of the larger purpose of maintaining and extending the American “empire.” He see the Iraq War as the point of convergence for a number of “strands” of that policy, including energy security, global military superiority and antiterrorism.

This is an ambitious effort, but it doesn't come off. Despite the fact that the book is based on a PhD thesis, there is no serious discussion of the literature – whether that relating to the work of Williams or Kolko et al., or to the place of oil in US foreign policy. There are a few pages on the work of the Cold War revisionists but they are superficial and tokenistic. The details of their arguments are not discussed and the extensive critique of those arguments might as well not exist as far as this book is concerned. Mahdi thus claims to be extending and confirming an argument which is never specified and whose weaknesses are never acknowledged. He refers repeatedly to Presidents pursuing an open-door policy or “economic openness” without ever telling us what that actually means in anything but the vaguest terms. The result is that the argument at the broadest level never goes beyond mere assertion.

There are also problems with the more specific arguments. Whilst the book is peppered with footnotes, key points are often unsupported by evidence and where citation is provided the reference is typically to a secondary source rather than to a primary one (clearly, there are limitations on access to primary material given the contemporary nature of the topic, but there are far more available than are used here). Much of the time, citations and quotations are used not to provide evidence so much as to present a list of other authors saying the same thing as this author, albeit in slightly different ways. Saying that Noam Chomsky, Michael Klare and four other people agree with you does not amount to a convincing argument, however, unless you are already a fan of those authors.

In addition, there is a tendency to cherry-pick evidence and to ignore anything which doesn't fit with the argument. Yes, you can find a set of quotes from US policymakers post-9/11 in which they say that terrorism is a threat to the open global economic system. You can also find a whole range of other reasons given for initiating the War on Terror that are not cited here. A compelling reason (such as a well-developed theoretical/explanatory framework) might justify ignoring the latter and only focussing on the former, but none is provided.

Once or twice the interpretation of the evidence ventures into the territory of the conspiracy theorists. Mahdi cites the fact that Donald Rumsfeld used the same set of maps when planning the Iraq War as Dick Cheney used during his energy review as evidence of the link between energy and security policy. The principle of Occam's razor would suggest that he ought at least to have considered the possibility that the US government only had one set of maps of Iraq.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about this book is that there is much in the basic argument here that many readers, including this one, would broadly agree with. Nevertheless, the argument as presented here is so oversimplified, so reductionist and so poorly evidenced that it is wholly unpersuasive and probably does more harm than good to the case it is trying to advance.