OTD in History: The Yom Kippur War
Tangled relations started an oil crisis in 1973
October 6, 1973, was the start of “The October War” or the “Yom Kippur War,” when Syria and Egypt double-teamed Israel during one of their major holidays. Israel had only held that land for about six years (on this go-round) and the Arabs wanted to repossess it. This has been going on for quite some time and would take too long to summarize. (lol)
Anyway, as is too often the case, the Middle East heated up and soon both sides reached out to their big brothers, who themselves were in the middle of their own “will they/won’t they” conflict. The Soviets backed the Arabs, and the US backed Israel. Sounds like a superb idea for two nuclear powers to do at the height of the Cold War, yes yes.
Fortunately this party didn’t last too long—the October War wrapped by the 25th. However, the OPEC crisis would last a lot longer. All the Arab nations produced a huge amount of the world’s petroleum, so they scaled back production and stopped exporting to the U.S. in retaliation. Oil prices here quadrupled pretty much instantly, and this led to price hikes for the remainder of the decade. My dad got his license in ‘75 and he told me he got a ticket once for driving like a spaz—the official citation was “wasting resources” or something like that.
Prices wouldn’t come back down until the mid-80s, though in the end this had more to do with the general state of the economy than the ‘73 OPEC embargo.