The Politics of Oil

Oil is intrinsically political. No other resource commands the interest and passion of oil, the intrigue of wily oilmen, robed sheiks, kings and sultans, roughnecking cowboys, and stiff-suited executives. Jimmy Carter, the president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, won and then lost an election, in large part due to oil. And, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) redressed global power balances in a seemingly irreversible way when it discarded the colonial model of oil exploitation, asserted its power to control a significant part of the world’s oil reserves, and moved the price of a barrel of oil from single digits to triple digits. Oil, and the cars and trucks that consume it, are typically the largest items in countries’ balance of trade. Now, many hourly newscasts quote the value of the Dow Jones Industrial stock market average and the price of oil. And, in the year of the Deepwater Horizon spill, China, the world’s next oil-thirsty nation, overtook the United States as the world’s largest market for automobiles and overtook Japan to became the world’s second largest economy.