In the fall of 1956, AP Foreign News Analyst William L. Ryan sat down to write a piece that read less like breaking news and more like a stress test. The headline: U.S. Taking Stock Of Oil Production To Meet Any Crisis. The anxiety driving it: Suez.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal just two months earlier, sending shockwaves through Western capitals. Western Europe at the time was importing two million barrels of oil per day from the Middle East, with 1.2 million of those moving by tanker straight through the canal. For Britain and France especially, Nasser’s move wasn’t just a political affront. It was a direct threat to the fuel keeping their economies running.
Ryan’s piece tried to answer a deceptively simple question: could the United States handle it? At the time, the U.S. was producing nearly 7.5 million barrels of oil a day, roughly half of all Free World production, and the article noted America had enough domestic supply to sustain itself in the short term.
But Western Europe was a different story entirely.
Without Middle East oil flowing freely, the continent faced a genuine energy crisis, and the U.S. couldn’t fully cover the gap.
The article posed a series of cascading “what ifs”:
- What if the Suez Canal were shut down?
- What if Middle East pipelines were sabotaged?
- What if Arab nations nationalized their oil fields outright?
The answers weren’t reassuring.
Ryan quoted oil expert Walter J. Levy, a top-ranking adviser to the U.S. government on petroleum, who estimated that if Middle East oil were cut off entirely, Western Europe would need an additional one million barrels per day just to stay afloat, a volume that would take years of new drilling and infrastructure to produce.
The article also flagged “spare producibility,” the idea that the U.S. could theoretically ramp up output quickly in an emergency.
In 1956, that buffer was estimated at about two million barrels a day. It was a meaningful cushion. But Ryan was clear: it wouldn’t be enough on its own, and the logistics of actually moving that oil to Europe through tankers and across oceans remained a massive and unresolved problem.
The Suez Crisis ultimately forced Britain to purchase oil from the United States after being cut off from its usual Middle Eastern supplies, and Venezuela stepped up production by 10% and the U.S. by 7% in the months immediately following the crisis to help stabilize Western European markets. The system held, barely, and the canal reopened by early 1957.
But the article published in September 1956 captured a moment before any of that was certain, when the entire Western energy architecture felt like it was balanced on a very thin wire.
Nearly 70 years later, that wire is still there.
U.S. crude oil production reached a record high of more than 13.6 million barrels per day in 2025, nearly double what it was during the Suez crisis era, and the U.S. is now a net energy exporter. The shale revolution changed the math in ways Ryan couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying vulnerability he identified in 1956 hasn’t disappeared. It’s just shifted geography.
The oil market remains global, which means the price Americans pay at the pump is still set by global supply and demand and still vulnerable to disruptions wherever they occur. The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 20% of all global petroleum trade, and recent conflict in the region has made that chokepoint relevant again.
As of early March 2026, Brent crude prices had risen sharply, settling near $94 a barrel and up about 50% from the start of the year, as petroleum shipments through the Strait fell and some Middle East production was shut in.
Ryan’s 1956 article asked whether America was ready to meet “any crisis.” In the months that followed its publication, the canal reopened, markets stabilized, and the immediate threat passed. The questions he raised, about supply buffers, pipeline vulnerability, and the limits of domestic production, continued to shape U.S. energy policy debates for decades. They still do.
View original article “US Taking Stock Of Oil Production To Meet Any Crisis” Daytona Beach Morning Journal (Sep 23, 1956).
