How Resource Shortages Sparked Egypt’s Months-Long Crisis

Underlying growing instability is the Egyptian state’s increasing inability to contain the devastating social impacts of interconnected energy, water and food crises over the last few decades.

.. In 1973, U.S. senator and oil expert Henry Jackson noted that Israel and the Shah’s Iran were “reliable friends of the United States” who, along with Saudi Arabia, “have served to inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab states…who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal source of petroleum in the Persian Gulf.”