When the war ended, the United States faced the problem of stabilizing the peace. Over the next forty-five years numerous major crises occurred, in many of which oil played a key role. Europe underwent a coal shortage, the first energy crisis, immediately after the war. The Marshall Plan, created to solve that and other problems, was hampered by the first Iranian crisis of 1950-1954. From the 1956 Suez crisis to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, oil proved to be the most important consideration in America’s Middle Eastern policy. The United States sought to balance support for the new state of Israel against the pressures of the oil producers, mostly Arab, united in 1960 as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec).
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