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The United States and the Control of World Oil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Simon Bromley
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Abstract

To what extent is a drive to appropriate the world's oil a driving force behind American foreign policy? This paper argues that rather than viewing US foreign policy as driven by the expansionary forces of US oil companies seeking new reserves and markets, or by rising concern about levels of import dependence, it is more illuminating to ask how the broader nature of American geopolitics shapes policies towards international oil. The United States does seek to exercise a degree of influence over world oil second to none, but the form of that influence is very ambiguous and very different from the kinds of control over raw materials traditionally associated with imperial powers.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , 2005 , pp. 225 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005.

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References

1 Michael Klare, ‘Blood For Oil: The Bush–Cheney Energy Strategy’, in Socialist Register 2004, London, Merlin Press, 2003, p. 180.

2 Ibid., p. 181.

3 There is now something of a consensus on this across the political spectrum. On the left, see, for example, Alex Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power: The Bush Administration's Plan for the World, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003; Peter Gowan, ‘The American Campaign For Global Sovereignty’, in Socialist Register 2003, London, Merlin Press, 2002; and David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003; and, on the right, George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy, London, Phoenix, 2004. There are dissenting voices: Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke assert that the neo-conservatives who influenced policy after 9/11 have little interest in economics and that oil was not a major part of their thinking about Iraq, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

4 Edward Porter, ‘U.S. Energy Policy, Economic Sanctions and World Oil Supply’, Policy Analysis and Statistics Department of the American Petroleum Institute, June 2001, quoted from the Executive Summary, no page numbers, available at www.api.org.

5 Harvey, The New Imperialism, pp. 73, 201, 206.

6 Ibid., p. 85.

7 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Global Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostratgic Imperatives, New York, Basic Books, 1997; and The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, New York, Basic Books, 2004.

8 This is the other side of the argument also stressed by Brzezinski and many others. I have discussed this point more fully in Simon Bromley, ‘The Logic of American Power’, in Alex Colas and Richard Saull (eds), The War on Terror and the American Empire After the Cold War, London, Routledge, 2005.

9 O'Brien, Patrick, ‘The Myth of Anglophone Succession: From British Primacy to American Hegemony’, New Left Review, 2: 24 (2003), p. 118.Google Scholar

10 David Reynolds, ‘American Globalism: Mass, Motion and the Multiplier Effect’, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, London, Pimlico, 2002, pp. 243–60.

11 William Fox, The Superpowers, New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1944.

12 Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, New York, Basic Books, 2003, p. 87.

13 See, especially, John Odell, The Control of Oil, New York, Pantheon Books, 1976.

14 Source: Simon Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; and BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2004, London, BP, 2004, at www.bp.com.

15 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (ed. and trans. by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith), London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, p. 317.

16 Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2004.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 These are only approximate measures of import dependence as even net importing regions like the United States also export some of their production, largely in order to balance the quality of the oil needed for refining.

20 Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, p. 82.

21 Ibid., p. 91.

22 Ibid., p. 83.

23 ‘The Dragon and the Eagle’ (a survey of the world economy by Pam Woodall), The Economist, 2 October 2004, p. 11.

24 See the article by the IEA's executive director, Claude Mandil, ‘Oil: Is the Sense of Crisis Overdone?’, Financial Times, 19 October 2004.

25 International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2004, Paris, IEA, 2003.

26 Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 1998, 2004, London, BP, at www.bp.com.

27 See, in particular, Ian Skeet, OPEC: Twenty-five Years of Prices and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; and Pierre Terzian, OPEC: The Inside Story, London, Zed Press, 1985.

28 I have described and analysed these development in more detail in Bromley, American Hegemony and World Oil.

29 Avi Shlaim, War and Peace in the Middle East (revised and updated edition), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995, p. 36.

30 The social and political structure of the Saudi state precluded the development of large-scale domestic armed forces, for fear of creating a source of coup d’état against the ruling family, while the smaller Gulf states saw the role of the United States as protection against their larger neighbours – Iran and Iraq, of course, but also Saudi Arabia.

31 Porter, ‘US Energy Policy’, p. 7.

32 Elizabeth Wishnick, ‘Growing U.S. Security Interests in Central Asia’, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2002, available at www.Carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/.

33 See the important analysis by Goel, Ran, ‘A Bargain Born of a Paradox: The Oil Industry's Role in American Domestic and Foreign Policy’, New Political Economy, 9: 4 (2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 The real case for war was set out most carefully and powerfully in Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The United States and Iraq: The Crisis, the Strategy, and the Prospects after Saddam, New York, Random House, 2002.

35 Fred Halliday, ‘September 11, 2001 and the Greater West Asian Crisis’, in Fred Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences, London, Saqi Books, 2002, pp. 35–50.

36 National Energy Policy Development Group, National Energy Policy, Washington, DC, The White House, May 2001, ch. 8, pp. 3–4.

37 Robert Vitalis, ‘The Closing of the Arabian Oil Frontier and the Future of Saudi–American Relations’, Middle East Report, 204 (Summer 1997), p. 16; for a more detailed discussion, see Simon Bromley, ‘Oil and the Middle East: The End of US Hegemony?’, Middle East Report, 208 (Fall 1998), pp. 19–22.

38 John Hartshorn, Oil Trade: Politics and Prospects, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 66.

39 Michael Renner, ‘The New Oil Order: Washington's War on Iraq is the Lynchpin to Controlling Persian Gulf Oil’, Foreign Policy in Focus, 14 February 2003 at www.fpic.org.

40 That earlier, post-war oil diplomacy was much more exclusive and was designed to contest British interests in the region. But that was in a context where there was indeed a rival imperialism and the United States was concerned that the Middle East might be tied into the sterling bloc. The point is that the very success of the USA in Saudi Arabia (and later in Iran) meant the defeat of British imperialism in the Middle East as part of the creation of a unified international capitalist economy under US hegemony.