please join me in welcoming andrew scott cooper. [applause] >> thank you, geir, and thank you to the gerald r. ford presidential library for hosting the and for making my research and this wonderful even possible. you may have heard the expression it's good to be king, well, tonight it's good to be a historian for oil diplomacy and oil dependency. "the new york times" published an op-ed on oil dependency and "the wall street journal" published one on the history, history studies in creating a dynamic worst force. tonight we bridge to areas of public interest. it's a rare and wonderful thing for a historian to watch events our only speculate about a generation ago and finally come to pass more than three decades later. five years ago when i began my research into u.s. oil diplomacy in the 1970s, i was puzzled by references made in documents from 1976 that read like something out of a financial thriller. there was talk of a sudden increase in oil prices triggering a global financial crisis. the bankruptcy of countries in southern euro