As President Carter prepared for his first official visit to Mexico in February, 1979, to discuss, among other things, U.S. access to its neighbor's new-found oil, the U.S. secretary of energy, James R. Schlesinger, warned that the security of the Western democracies could be completely undermined if instability became endemic in the Persian Gulf and the flow of oil to Europe, Japan, and the United States was sharply curtailed.

There was considerable irony in this situation. As columnist James Reston observed in the New York Times, the president was not going to Mexico "to deal with the price of Mexican gas—though that is an immediate and divisive problem—but with the price of neglect.