You don't think we've surpassed that yet? Yom Kippur War On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a military attack on Israel starting the Yom Kippur War. [1] The persistence of the Arab-Israeli conflict finally triggered pressure on the West over its support of Israel (in part because of operations such as Operation Nickel Grass). Egypt and Syria, though not major oil-exporting countries, joined the latter grouping to help articulate its objectives. On October 17, 1973, Arab states placed an embargo on oil as punishment for U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. [2] During the war the Arab world imposed an oil embargo against the United States, Western Europe, and Japan for their support of Israel. By the early 1970s the great Western oil conglomerates suddenly faced a unified bloc of producers. The Arab-Israeli conflict triggered a crisis already in the making. The West could not continue to increase its energy use 5% annually, pay low oil prices, yet sell inflation-priced goods to the petroleum producers in the Third World. This was stressed by the Shah of Iran, whose nation was the world's second-largest exporter of oil and the closest ally of the United States in the Middle East at the time. "Of course [the world price of oil] is going to rise," the Shah told the New York Times in 1973. "Certainly! And how...; You [Western nations] increased the price of wheat you sell us by 300%, and the same for sugar and cement...; You buy our crude oil and sell it back to us, refined as petrochemicals, at a hundred times the price you've paid to us...; It's only fair that, from now on, you should pay more for oil. Let's say ten times more."[3]

Inevitably.