The wars that really are about the oil

Is international conflict really just a fight over oil? It sometimes seems that way. In Syria and Iraq, the militants of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ sell captured oil while battling to establish a puritanical Sunni theo-cracy. From Central Asia to Ukraine, Russia is contesting attempts (backed by the US) to minimise Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ allows the US to threaten the choke points through which most of China’s oil imports must pass.

Conspiracy-mongering petrodeterminists who try to reduce world politics to nothing but a clash for oil are too crude (pun intended). No shadowy cabal of oil company executives pulls the strings of world politics. Most of the world’s oil and gas is the property of government-owned companies, and even private oil companies like ExxonMobil and BP generally defer to their home-country governments. But a grasp of global petropolitics is nonetheless vital to any understanding of the crises in international relations we see today. We also need to know a little recent history.

The end of the Cold War left America’s leadership wondering how to justify the US military protectorates over western Europe and Japan. The 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam provided the answer: instead of temporarily protecting its European and East Asian allies from the Red Army, the US would henceforth perpetually protect them from other threats, including the disruption of the oil supplies on which their economies depended.

By policing critical regions like the Persian Gulf on behalf of all industrial nations, Washington hoped to forestall re-armament and unilateral scrambles for security, including energy security, by the other great powers. George W. Bush expressed this idea in a 2002 address at West Point: ‘America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.