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By Root 6713 0

1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, was seized by violent Sunni Muslim extremists, who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. After retaking the mosque, the panicked Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their own Muslim fundamentalists, which went like this: “Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, veiling women, curtailing music, restricting relations between the sexes, and imposing religious education. We will go even further and lavish abundant resources on you to spread the austere Sunni Salafi/Wahhabi form of fundamentalism abroad.” This set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia to be the leader of the Muslim world, each exporting its puritanical version of Islam. In 1979, “Islam lost its brakes,” said Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian expert on the Middle East. Mosques and schools all over the Muslim world tilted toward more fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. There was no moderate countertrend, or at least none backed by resources remotely comparable to those of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

As if that weren’t enough for one year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. In response, Arab and Muslim mujahideen fighters flocked there to drive the Russians out, a jihad financed by Saudi Arabia at America’s behest. In the process, both Pakistan and Afghanistan moved toward a more austere Islamist political orientation. Eventually, the hard-core Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, led by the likes of Osama bin Laden, turned their guns on America and its Arab allies, culminating on September 11, 2001.

Gone were the harmless good old days when our foreign gasoline purchases merely bought villas and yachts on the Riviera for Saudi princes, not to mention gambling sprees in London and Monte Carlo. After the assault on Mecca and the Iranian revolution, our oil addiction started funding madrassas in Pakistan, fundamentalist mosques in Afghanistan and Europe, and Stinger missiles for the Taliban, all of which came back to haunt America in subsequent years. In other words, before 1979 our oil addiction was esthetically distasteful; after 1979 it became geopolitically lethal. We were funding both sides of the war with radical Islam—simultaneously paying for our own military with our tax dollars and indirectly supporting our enemies and their jihadist ideology with our oil dollars.

Hard to believe, but 1979 was just getting started. The energy world would be substantially affected by two other political events of that year. Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain on May 4, 1979. She and Ronald Reagan, who took office as president of the United States in 1981, implemented free-market-friendly economic policies that helped to pave the way for the expansion of globalization after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This increased economic activity the world over, massively increasing the number of people who could afford cars, motor scooters, electric appliances, and international travel.

Less noticed but just as important, in 1979, three years after Mao Tse-tung’s death, China’s communist government permitted small farmers to raise their own crops on individual plots and to sell the surplus for their own profit. The agricultural reforms had started in the countryside in 1978, but in 1979 capitalism broke out from China’s rural farms into the broader Chinese economy.

In 1979, “the first business license in China was given to Zhang Huamei, a nineteen-year-old daughter of workers in a state umbrella factory who illegally sold trinkets from a table [but] who wanted to conduct her business legally,” according to a historical reconstruction of this era published in The Times of London (December 5, 2009). The Times noted that Zhang is now a dollar millionaire and head of the Huamei Garment Accessory Company, a supplier of many of the world’s buttons. Of her initial sale she said, “The first thing I sold was a toy watch. It was a sunny morning in May 1978. I bought it for 0.15 yuan and sold it for