David Howery said:yes. The embargo ended up hurting them more than us. The US threw lots of money into improvement of energy efficiency, smaller cars, etc., and they also started looking for oil from other areas. The Middle East is a convenient place to get oil, as there are pipelines, ports, and everything all set up for it, but if it was forced on us, we could go elsewhere....
Matthew Craw said:There seems to be some confusion here, of course the US would have developed alternate sources of oil. but extraction/producion costs would have been higher, oil prices would rise and that's how an OPEC embargo would hurt the US, not by physically elimanating the oil supply.
It's largely moot anyway as teh Saudis and other Gulf States would be much less able to survive the embargo than the West. The present tendency in teh US to see the oil trade as a purely Western interst is nonsense, the major exporting states are ar least as dependant on it.
If teh Saudis really wanted to hurt the US they'd do it by pulling out the $2 trillion they have invested there, setting of a stock market crash as severe as that of 1929.