How the Nixon Doctrine blew up the Persian Gulf, undermined US security
Fifty years ago today the White House set off a regional arms race that created a downward spiral for decades to come.
David M. Wight is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967–1988 (Cornell University Press, 2021). He has also published articles and book chapters on the history of international relations, the United States, and the Middle East in Diplomatic History, History & Memory, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, and the Washington Post, among others.
Wight has previously been an Ernest May Post-Doctoral Fellow in History and Policy within the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and a U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Among other awards, he was the recipient of a Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
Wight is currently researching the dramatic rise of higher education exchanges between the Arab world and the United States during the Cold War, the United States and the Iran-Iraq War, and the long historical arc of relations between the Middle East and the United States.
Fifty years ago today the White House set off a regional arms race that created a downward spiral for decades to come.