In the decades following World War II, the United States and Saudi Arabia participated together in a transnational culture of consumption rooted in the intimate link between petroleum and the automobile. Diplomatic and economic relations between these two countries evolved in tandem with a global petroleum order that underwrote American domestic prosperity and a consumerist ethos built on automobility. At the same time, U.S. and Saudi policymakers and business leaders encouraged expanded mobility in Saudi Arabia, including the importation of cars and trucks, and the infrastructure necessary to support them. As the Saudis' adoption of the steel-and-petroleum car drew the kingdom further into the system of automobility, it not only gradually standardized Saudi urban movement, but also reshaped culture, society and notions of class in Saudi Arabia along consumerist lines. Through their central positions in the petroleum order, the economies of Saudi Arabia and the United States were progressively linked from the 1950s through the 1970s in a so-called "special relationship" based on mutual interest in global consumer capitalism. This interdependence was revealed dramatically with the oil price hikes of 1973-1974, when Saudi Arabia insisted on full participation in the system, including management of its natural resources and rapid development of its own technocratic, mass consumption society.

During this critical period, however, American consumers came to view Saudi Arabia as a paradoxical society moving too quickly "from the camel to the Cadillac" through the presumed appropriate stages of historical and economic development. This image of Saudi Arabia drew on old Orientalist assumptions, but also pointed to deep, largely unstated connections between the culture of consumption in the United States and the articulation of Cold War development doctrines such as modernization theory. Despite the crucial part played by the U.S.-Saudi relationship in the global economic system, these cultural attitudes about entitlement, resource allocation and Arab wealth left most Americans completely unprepared for the shock of the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia assumed new power in the international community. The American public's experience of and response to the momentous challenge of Arab economic power reshaped and distorted popular attitudes toward not only Saudi Arabia, but the larger Arab world, contributing ultimately to a dramatic extension of U.S. power into the Middle East in the late 1970s and early 1980s.