Seventy-three years ago President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on his trip back from his Yalta conference with U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, held his last meeting with foreign leaders aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake. One was with the desert warrior king, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, who sailed in with seven live sheep and a tent to sleep in on deck.

The United States had provided almost all of its allies with all the oil they used during World War II. But there were (unfounded) fears that American wells were tapped out, while American geologists produced (well-founded) estimates of giant untapped pools in the Saudi desert. Roosevelt wanted American, not British, firms controlling it