After eliminating gold as the anchor of the world's economy in '71, Nixon wanted higher oil prices so as to derail the efforts of a conference of rich nations known as the Group of Twenty to create a new international system that would subordinate the dollar to so-called Spatial Drawing Rights. Nixon, of course, wanted the dollar to be king. "With the quadrupling of oil prices in the autumn of 1973, as Williamson points out, all the conference participants realised that collective planning of a new consensual international monetary order was dead and the whole negotiation fizzled out." (Gowan, The Global Gamble, page 20)
"The Nixon administration was planning to get OPEC to greatly increase its oil prices a full two years before OPEC did so, and as early as 1972 the Nixon administration planned for the US private banks to recycle the petrodollars when OPEC finally did take US advice and jack up oil prices." (Page 21)
According to his ambassador in Saudi Arabia at the time, Nixon just wanted to screw with the economies of Japan and Western Europe. But why would he want to do that unless to sabotage the new economic order they were trying to create?
Gowan emphasizes that neither the US oil companies nor the banks had nearly enough imagination to concoct a scheme of this magnitude.
Ted