By the late 1970s, the United States had gone from exporting oil to importing more than fifty percent of oil used to meet its domestic needs. Increasingly, that oil came from a member of OPEC. In 1979 President Carter asked Saudi Arabia to increase its exports, which it did, announcing that the additional volume was an Independence Day present. However, as Herblock interpreted the gesture, “This was not independence. . . . it was a great nation on its knees.”