| Author | Helen Thompson |
|---|---|
| Year | 2022 |
Page 19: Consequently, by the time the First World War began, the preponderance of oil production lay in the Western Hemisphere, with the United States supplying nearly two-thirds of the world's oil and Mexico operating as the world's third largest producer. … The British and German governments wanted to control these Middle Eastern resources. Although British and German firms did cooperate to form the Turkish Petroleum Company consortium in 1912, Middle Eastern oil played a significant part in shaping British-German rivalry before the First World War. If Britain's presence in the southern Gulf and imperial control of India gave it an obvious advantage, Kaiser Wilhelm II began courting a resource relationship with the Ottoman Sultan from the time he assumed the throne. To this end, Deutsche Bank secured the concession from the Ottoman state to build a railway from Konya in Anatolia to Baghdad and Basra that could connect to the line from Berlin to Constantinople. Just as significantly, the right to explore for oil by the track accompanied the concession. …
Page 21: When the war [WW1] was over, the British foreign secretary pronounced that the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil'; 80 per cent of that oil was provided by the United States, 26
Page 22: When, at Versailles, various proposals were floated for an American mandate for administrative rule over various former Ottoman territories without formal annexation, Wilson said that he could think of nothing the people of the United States would be less inclined to accept than military responsibility in Asia.
Page 23: Post-war administrations in Washington were acutely aware of the implications of the American absence from the Middle East and the British and French bids for oil independence. Having expended so much oil supplying the Allies, the United States became in 1919 a net importer of oil and remained so for the next three years. Wilson concluded that 'there seemed to be no method by which we could assure ourselves of the necessary supply at home and abroad.
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By 1919-20, the reality was that British companies, despite controlling less than 5 per cent of the world's oil supply, now possessed at least 50 per cent of the world’s oil reserves. Page 25: Wilson was still describing the prospect of the United States fighting in Europe as a crime'. Only Germany's offer to ally with Mexico against the United States whereby Germany would support a Mexican annexation of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico finally pushed Wilson to declare war, and, even then, exclusively against Germany. This left Britain and France to their war against Austria-Hungary and, rather consequentially, the Ottoman Empire. When Wilson became a proponent of American leadership in Eurasia, he ignited his own domestic resistance.
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Between 1934 and 1936, a Senate Committee investigated Wall Street's role in the United States entering the First World War, leading Congress to pass neutrality laws in 1935 and 1936, with the second banning loans to belligerents.
Page25: Wilson was still describing the prospect of the United States fighting in Europe as a "crime'. Only Germany's offer to ally with Mexico against the United States -whereby Germany would support a Mexican annexation of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico finally pushed Wilson to declare war, and, even then, exclusively against Germany. This left Britain and France to their war against Austria-Hungary and, rather consequentially, the Ottoman Empire. …
[Due to JP Morgan’s link to British and French supply chains during war] Between 1934 and 1936, a Senate Committee investigated Wall Street's role in the United States entering the First World War, leading Congress to pass neutrality laws in 1935 and 1936, with the second banning loans to belligerents. Page 28: Unlike Britain and France, Germany did not have an empire or spheres of influence in the Middle East and was near entirely dependent at the start of the interwar years on oil coming from the Western Hemisphere. To try to reverse this weakness, Weimar governments from 1926 actively supported IG Fibrin's project to develop a synthetic oil plant at Leuna in Eastern Germany whereby coal would be transformed into oil through hydrogenation. For Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, this project, helped from 1929 by Standard Oil of New Jersey, represented a German reason of state. Germany had, he said, no foreign policy without the German chemical company and coal. Wanting war, the Nazis saw ending Germany's foreign energy dependency entirely as an urgent imperative. Hitler believed that the need to import raw materials and oil had brought about defeat in 1918. His 1936 Four-Year Plan presumed that Germany could be fully independent from imported oil by 1940. But Nazi Germany never solved its oil problem. Although the Leuna plant delivered synthetic oil to the Luftwaffe, Hitler had not achieved German oil independence when he attacked Poland in 1939.
Page 29: Hitler brought to bear on Operation Barbarossa, and however far those preoccupations shaped the catastrophe that followed, oil weakness was a near sufficient motive for the invasion.
Page 30: In 1941, Roosevelt turned down a request for financial assistance from the Saudi King, In Saud. But in 1943, the sheer volume of oil being used in the war changed his mind. Although Saudi Arabia was a neutral country, he agreed a Lend-Lease arrangement with King Saud, proclaiming the kingdom vital' to the US' defence.
… This new US-Saudi relationship would become a permanent feature of the post-Second World War world.
Page 31: For the large European states bereft of domestic oil, the failed bids for energy independence constituted a perhaps decisive part of how European-dominated Eurasia came to an end. The age of oil would not allow for a European world power or a European continental empire.
Page 32: For nearly four decades from the 1970s, Washington reluctantly tolerated Germany's dependency on Russian oil and gas because the United States had neither the domestic supply nor enough wherewithal in the Middle East to offer an alternative to it. But during the 2010s, in a world where both American and Russian oil and gas were resurgent, this connection became a significant geopolitical fault line tied to Ukraine's independence, NATO enlargement, and Germany's weak military capability. The Russia-China- Iran relationship has complicated the fallout from these issues further because all three European NATO members that were party to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal want a gas relationship with Iran. The origins of the United States present engagement with the geopolitics of European energy dependency lie in what happened after the Second World War. There was one overriding caveat to American geopolitical power in mid-twentieth century Eurasia: victory in the war in Europe depended on a military alliance with the Soviet Union, a state that, like Germany, had invaded Poland in 1939 before turning aggressively on Finland, the Baltic republics, and parts of Romania. The Soviet Union was for a while anyway a formidable geopolitical rival. As Soviet oil exports in the late 1920 and early 1930s showed, it also potentially offered the European states energy options that would strengthen that geopolitical power.