The Ubiquity of Oil

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between oil and great power politics. For over a hundred years, oil has been ubiquitous as both an object of political intrigue and a feature of everyday life, yet its effects on the behavior of major powers remain poorly understood. This book focuses on one particular aspect of oil: its coercive potential. Across time and space, great powers have feared that dependence on imported petroleum might make them vulnerable to coercion by hostile actors. They worry that an enemy could cut off oil to weaken them militarily or punish them economically, and then use this threat as a basis for political blackmail. Oil is so essential to great powers that taking a state's imports hostage could give an enemy significant leverage in a dispute. The book presents the first systematic framework to understand how fears of oil coercion shape international affairs. Great powers counter prospective threats with costly and risky policies that lessen vulnerability, ideally, before the country can be targeted. These measures, which can be called “anticipatory strategies,” vary enormously, from self-sufficiency efforts to actions as extreme as launching wars.

Oil and the Future of Great Power Politics

This concluding chapter explores the implications of the theory for great power politics as China continues to rise in the twenty-first century. If significant quantities of Persian Gulf oil could be realistically transported overland, away from U.S. naval interference, then the future threat to Chinese imports would remain low. Combined with a petroleum deficit that is likely to be large, Chinese coercive vulnerability could be held to a moderate level. Moderate coercive vulnerability should induce China to pursue indirect control as it emerges as a great power. Thus, the theory predicts that China is likely to eventually forge alliances with major oil-producing countries and transit states to keep oil in “friendly hands.” As yet, China is too militarily weak to shield friendly oil-producing states from interference by the United States or other potential rivals, but the beginnings of an alliance-based strategy appear to be taking shape under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), described by some analysts as a nascent framework for twenty-first-century Chinese grand strategy.