2008 Woodie Awards
SRU hosts lecture about United States foreign policy
By Rob Ambrosino
Issue date: 4/1/05 Section: News
Anthony Khoury, professor of economics at Diablo Valley College in California and Slippery Rock State College alumnus, administered a lecture, "The Politics of Oil in the Middle East," on Tuesday evening.
The event was co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Association of Students (C.A.S.), the Slippery Rock Peace & Justice Coalition, the School of Business and the departments of political science, philosophy and geography, geology and the environment.
Retired SRU philosophy professor Ted Kneupper said that to his knowledge, Khoury, who studied here in the early '70s, was one of the first international students to come to SRU from the Middle East. Khoury, a native of Israel, continued his education at the University of Cincinnati upon his graduation from SRU and currently resides in San Francisco. This visit was his first to campus since 1981.
Khoury's presentation traced the history of U.S. policy toward Middle Eastern oil from the early 20th century up to the Iraq War. He explained how the United States was the world's foremost exporter of oil during the early 1900s; primarily extracting oil from wells in Texas, California and Oklahoma. A few decades later, however, the United States realized that its oil supply might not be infinite. To ensure the country's subsistence, President Franklin Roosevelt made a pact with Great Britain and Denmark to share the oil supply from Iraq, Iran and Kuwait.
The next significant step in the politics of oil by the United States, in Khoury's view, involved President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who declared in 1973 that the United States could not allow the Middle Eastern countries to dictate U.S. policy. This line of thought gave rise to an ideology that has largely guided contemporary U.S. foreign policy, neoconservatism. Khoury described neoconservatism as calling for United States primacy in the world, or "empire building."
Many of the neoconservatives, or "neocons," held over from the Nixon and Henry Ford administrations to the Reagan presidency.
The event was co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Association of Students (C.A.S.), the Slippery Rock Peace & Justice Coalition, the School of Business and the departments of political science, philosophy and geography, geology and the environment.
Retired SRU philosophy professor Ted Kneupper said that to his knowledge, Khoury, who studied here in the early '70s, was one of the first international students to come to SRU from the Middle East. Khoury, a native of Israel, continued his education at the University of Cincinnati upon his graduation from SRU and currently resides in San Francisco. This visit was his first to campus since 1981.
Khoury's presentation traced the history of U.S. policy toward Middle Eastern oil from the early 20th century up to the Iraq War. He explained how the United States was the world's foremost exporter of oil during the early 1900s; primarily extracting oil from wells in Texas, California and Oklahoma. A few decades later, however, the United States realized that its oil supply might not be infinite. To ensure the country's subsistence, President Franklin Roosevelt made a pact with Great Britain and Denmark to share the oil supply from Iraq, Iran and Kuwait.
The next significant step in the politics of oil by the United States, in Khoury's view, involved President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who declared in 1973 that the United States could not allow the Middle Eastern countries to dictate U.S. policy. This line of thought gave rise to an ideology that has largely guided contemporary U.S. foreign policy, neoconservatism. Khoury described neoconservatism as calling for United States primacy in the world, or "empire building."
Many of the neoconservatives, or "neocons," held over from the Nixon and Henry Ford administrations to the Reagan presidency.
