Oil's enduring sway over U.S. policy in the Middle East, and how it explains
the Iran crisis
Michael T. Klare on July 11, 2019
U.S. Navy soldier on Iraq's Mina al Bakr Oil Terminal in 2003. (Photo by PH1
Shane T. McCoy/US Navy) U.S. Navy soldier on Iraq's Mina al Bakr Oil
Terminal in 2003. (Photo by PH1 Shane T. McCoy/US Navy)
It's always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a
recent U.N. report about the prince's role in the murder of Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Asia and
the Middle East, pleading with foreign leaders to support "Sentinel." The
aim of that administration plan: to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz
and the Persian Gulf. Both Trump and Pompeo insisted that their efforts were
driven by concern over Iranian misbehavior in the region and the need to
ensure the safety of maritime commerce. Neither, however, mentioned one
inconvenient three-letter word - O-I-L - that lay behind their Iranian
maneuvering (as it has impelled every other American incursion in the Middle
East since World War II).
Now, it's true that the United States no longer relies on imported petroleum
for a large share of its energy needs. Thanks to the fracking revolution,
the country now gets the bulk of its oil - approximately 75% - from domestic
sources. (In 2008, that share had been closer to 35%.) Key allies in NATO
and rivals like China, however, continue to depend on Middle Eastern oil for
a significant proportion of their energy needs. As it happens, the world
economy - of which the U.S. is the leading beneficiary (despite President
Trump's self-destructive trade wars) - relies on an uninterrupted flow of
oil from the Persian Gulf to keep energy prices low. By continuing to serve
as the principal overseer of that flow, Washington enjoys striking
geopolitical advantages that its foreign policy elites would no more abandon
than they would their country's nuclear supremacy.
This logic was spelled out clearly by President Barack Obama in a September
2013 address to the U.N. General Assembly in which he declared that "the
United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power,
including military force, to secure our core interests" in the Middle East.
He then pointed out that, while the U.S. was steadily reducing its reliance
on imported oil, "the world still depends on the region's energy supply and
a severe disruption could destabilize the entire global economy."
Accordingly, he concluded, "We will ensure the free flow of energy from the
region to the world."
To some Americans, that dictum - and its continued embrace by President
Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo - may seem anachronistic. True,
Washington fought wars in the Middle East when the American economy was
still deeply vulnerable to any disruption in the flow of imported oil. In
1990, this was the key reason President George H.W. Bush gave for his
decision to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait after Saddam Hussein's invasion
of that land. "Our country now imports nearly half the oil it consumes and
could face a major threat to its economic independence," he told a
nationwide TV audience. But talk of oil soon disappeared from his comments
about what became Washington's first (but hardly last) Gulf War after his
statement provoked widespread public outrage. ("No Blood for Oil" became a
widely used protest sign then.) His son, the second President Bush, never
even mentioned that three-letter word when announcing his 2003 invasion of
Iraq. Yet, as Obama's U.N. speech made clear, oil remained, and still
remains, at the center of U.S. foreign policy. A quick review of global
energy trends helps explain why this has continued to be so.
The World's Undiminished Reliance on Petroleum
Despite all that's been said about climate change and oil's role in causing
it - and about the enormous progress being made in bringing solar and wind
power online - we remain trapped in a remarkably oil-dependent world. To
grasp this reality, all you have to do is read the most recent edition of
oil giant BP's "Statistical Review of World Energy," published this June. In
2018, according to that report, oil still accounted for by far the largest
share of world energy consumption, as it has every year for decades. All
told, 33.6% of world energy consumption last year was made up of oil, 27.2%
of coal (itself a global disgrace), 23.9% of natural gas, 6.8% of
hydro-electricity, 4.4% of nuclear power, and a mere 4% of renewables.
Most energy analysts believe that the global reliance on petroleum as a
share of world energy use will decline in the coming decades, as more
governments impose restrictions on carbon emissions and as consumers,
especially in the developed world, switch from oil-powered to electric
vehicles. But such declines are unlikely to prevail in every region of the
globe and total oil consumption may not even decline. According to
projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its "New Policies
Scenario" (which assumes significant but not drastic government efforts to
curb carbon emissions globally), Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are
likely to experience a substantially increased demand for petroleum in the
years to come, which, grimly enough, means global oil consumption will
continue to rise.
Concluding that the increased demand for oil in Asia, in particular, will
outweigh reduced demand elsewhere, the IEA calculated in its 2017 World
Energy Outlook that oil will remain the world's dominant source of energy in
2040, accounting for an estimated 27.5% of total global energy consumption.
That will indeed be a smaller share than in 2018, but because global energy
consumption as a whole is expected to grow substantially during those
decades, net oil production could still rise - from an estimated 100 million
barrels a day in 2018 to about 105 million barrels in 2040.
Of course, no one, including the IEA's experts, can be sure how future
extreme manifestations of global warming like the severe heat waves recently
tormenting Europe and South Asia could change such projections. It's
possible that growing public outrage could lead to far tougher restrictions
on carbon emissions between now and 2040. Unexpected developments in the
field of alternative energy production could also play a role in changing
those projections. In other words, oil's continuing dominance could still be
curbed in ways that are now unpredictable.
In the meantime, from a geopolitical perspective, a profound shift is taking
place in the worldwide demand for petroleum. In 2000, according to the IEA,
older industrialized nations - most of them members of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - accounted for about two-thirds
of global oil consumption; only about a third went to countries in the
developing world. By 2040, the IEA's experts believe that ratio will be
reversed, with the OECD consuming about one-third of the world's oil and
non-OECD nations the rest. More dramatic yet is the growing centrality of
the Asia-Pacific region to the global flow of petroleum. In 2000, that
region accounted for only 28% of world consumption; in 2040, its share is
expected to stand at 44%, thanks to the growth of China, India, and other
Asian countries, whose newly affluent consumers are already buyingcars,
trucks, motorcycles, and other oil-powered products.
Where will Asia get its oil? Among energy experts, there is little doubt on
this matter. Lacking significant reserves of their own, the major Asian
consumers will turn to the one place with sufficient capacity to satisfy
their rising needs: the Persian Gulf. According to BP, in 2018, Japan
already obtained 87% of its oil imports from the Middle East, India 64%, and
China 44%. Most analysts assume these percentages will only grow in the
years to come, as production in other areas declines.
This will, in turn, lend even greater strategic importance to the Persian
Gulf region, which now possesses more than 60% of the world's untapped
petroleum reserves, and to the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow
passagewaythrough which approximately one-third of the world's seaborne oil
passes daily. Bordered by Iran, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the
Strait is perhaps the most significant - and contested - geostrategic
location on the planet today.
Controlling the Spigot
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the same year that
militant Shiite fundamentalists overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, U.S.
policymakers concluded that America's access to Gulf oil supplies was at
risk and a U.S. military presence was needed to guarantee such access. As
President Jimmy Carter would say in his State of the Union Address on
January 23, 1980,
"The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of
great strategic importance: It contains more than two thirds of the world's
exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet
military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the
Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must
flow. Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force
to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on
the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault
will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
To lend muscle to what would soon be dubbed the "Carter Doctrine," the
president created a new U.S. military organization, the Rapid Deployment
Joint Task Force (RDJTF), and obtained basing facilities for it in the Gulf
region. Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter as president in 1981, made the
RDJTF into a full-scale "geographic combatant command," dubbed Central
Command, or CENTCOM, which continues to be tasked with ensuring American
access to the Gulf today (as well as overseeing the country's never-ending
wars in the Greater Middle East). Reagan was the first president to activate
the Carter Doctrine in 1987 when he ordered Navy warships to escort Kuwaiti
tankers, "reflagged" with the stars and stripes, as they traveled through
the Strait of Hormuz. From time to time, such vessels had been coming under
fire from Iranian gunboats, part of an ongoing "Tanker War," itself part of
the Iran-Iraq War of those years. The Iranian attacks on those tankers were
meant to punish Sunni Arab countries for backing Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein in that conflict. The American response, dubbed Operation Earnest
Will, offered an early model of what Secretary of State Pompeo is seeking to
establish today with his Sentinel program.
Operation Earnest Will was followed two years later by a massive
implementation of the Carter Doctrine, President Bush's 1990 decision to
push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Although he spoke of the need to protect
U.S. access to Persian Gulf oil fields, it was evident that ensuring a safe
flow of oil imports wasn't the only motive for such military involvement.
Equally important then (and far more so now): the geopolitical advantage
controlling the world's major oil spigot gave Washington.
When ordering U.S. forces into combat in the Gulf, American presidents have
always insisted that they were acting in the interests of the entire West.
In advocating for the "reflagging" mission of 1987, for instance, Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger argued (as he would later recall in his memoir
Fighting for Peace), "The main thing was for us to protect the right of
innocent, nonbelligerent and extremely important commerce to move freely in
international open waters - and, by our offering protection, to avoid
conceding the mission to the Soviets." Though rarely so openly acknowledged,
the same principle has undergirded Washington's strategy in the region ever
since: the United States alone must be the ultimate guarantor of unimpeded
oil commerce in the Persian Gulf.
Look closely and you can find this principle lurking in every fundamental
statement of U.S. policy related to that region and among the Washington
elite more generally. My own personal favorite, when it comes to pithiness,
is a sentence in a report on the geopolitics of energy issued in 2000 by the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think
tank well-populated with former government officials (several of whom
contributed to the report): "As the world's only superpower, [the United
States] must accept its special responsibilities for preserving access to
[the] worldwide energy supply." You can't get much more explicit than that.
Of course, along with this "special responsibility" comes a geopolitical
advantage: by providing this service, the United States cements its status
as the world's sole superpower and places every other oil-importing nation -
and the world at large - in a condition of dependence on its continued
performance of this vital function.
Originally, the key dependents in this strategic equation were Europe and
Japan, which, in return for assured access to Middle Eastern oil, were
expected to subordinate themselves to Washington. Remember, for example, how
they helped pay for Bush the elder's Iraq War (dubbed Operation Desert
Storm). Today, however, many of those countries, deeply concerned with the
effects of climate change, are seeking to lessen oil's role in their
national fuel mixes. As a result, in 2019, the countries potentially most at
the mercy of Washington when it comes to access to Gulf oil are economically
fast-expanding China and India, whose oil needs are only likely to grow.
That, in turn, will further enhance the geopolitical advantage Washington
enjoyed as long as it remains the principal guardian of the flow of oil from
the Persian Gulf. How it may seek to exploit this advantage remains to be
seen, but there is no doubt that all parties involved, including the
Chinese, are well aware of this asymmetric equation, which could give the
phrase "trade war" a far deeper and more ominous meaning.
The Iranian Challenge and the Specter of War
From Washington's perspective, the principal challenger to America's
privileged status in the Gulf is Iran. By reason of geography, that country
possesses a potentially commanding position along the northern Gulf and the
Strait of Hormuz, as the Reagan administration learned in 1987-1988 when it
threatened American oil dominance there. About this reality President Reagan
couldn't have been clearer. "Mark this point well: the use of the sea lanes
of the Persian Gulf will not be dictated by the Iranians," he declared in
1987 - and Washington's approach to the situation has never changed.
In more recent times, in response to U.S. and Israeli threats to bomb their
nuclear facilities or, as the Trump administration has done, impose economic
sanctions on their country, the Iranians have threatened on numerous
occasions to block the Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic, squeeze global
energy supplies, and precipitate an international crisis. In 2011, for
example, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that, should the
West impose sanctions on Iranian oil, "not even one drop of oil can flow
through the Strait of Hormuz." In response, U.S. officials have vowed ever
since to let no such thing happen, just as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
did in response to Rahimi at that time. "We have made very clear," he said,
"that the United States will not tolerate blocking of the Strait of Hormuz."
That, he added, was a "red line for us."
It remains so today. Hence, the present ongoing crisis in the Gulf, with
fierce U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil sales and threatening Iranian gestures
toward the regional oil flow in response. "We will make the enemy understand
that either everyone can use the Strait of Hormuz or no one," said Mohammad
Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, in July 2018.
And attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman near the entrance to the
Strait of Hormuz on June 13th could conceivably have been an expression of
just that policy, if - as claimed by the U.S. - they were indeed carried out
by members of the Revolutionary Guards. Any future attacks are only likely
to spur U.S. military action against Iran in accordance with the Carter
Doctrine. As Pentagon spokesperson Bill Urban put it in response to Jafari's
statement, "We stand ready to ensure the freedom of navigation and the free
flow of commerce wherever international law allows."
As things stand today, any Iranian move in the Strait of Hormuz that can be
portrayed as a threat to the "free flow of commerce" (that is, the oil
trade) represents the most likely trigger for direct U.S. military action.
Yes, Tehran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support for radical Shiite
movements throughout the Middle East will be cited as evidence of its
leadership's malevolence, but its true threat will be to American dominance
of the oil lanes, a danger Washington will treat as the offense of all
offenses to be overcome at any cost.
If the United States goes to war with Iran, you are unlikely to hear the
word "oil" uttered by top Trump administration officials, but make no
mistake: that three-letter word lies at the root of the present crisis, not
to speak of the world's long-term fate.
A version of this article originally ran on tomdispatch.com on July 11,
2019.
