So for a long time oil has played a special role in American foreign policy and military
strategy.
Oil is a uniquely important commodity in global affairs.
It’s an input to everything in our modern way of life; it’s very important for protecting
our prosperity; and at a certain level oil is essential for high-quality military power:
to fight you need access to oil.
And in the Cold War the United States was concerned that the Soviet Union could interrupt
American access to Persian Gulf oil, which we needed in order to defend Europe, defend
our own interests against the Soviet Union.
And so we took it on as a military mission to protect key sources of oil supplies around
the world, especially in the Persian Gulf, from outside interference (so from the Soviet
Union being able to threaten them).
Now, of course, for a long time the Soviet Union hasn’t existed.
That particular scenario hasn’t posed a challenge for the United States, but the United
States has feared oil has continued to play a role in American foreign and military policy
because the United States has feared that political disruptions in Middle East—internal
instability, the threat of extremist fundamentalist Muslim control in the Middle East, if that
came about—could pose a threat to American oil supplies that especially would hurt our
prosperity, that they could make us poor.
And so we’ve used military force to try to reduce instability in parts of the world,
especially the Persian Gulf, where we’re afraid that instability would threaten global
oil markets.
That policy has both been largely unnecessary and largely ineffective.
So it has happened that there was a moment where it seemed to work very well when we
sent troops in 1990 to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein who had just concord Kuwait,
and then we liberated Kuwait in the Gulf War but did not continue to attack Iraq.
And the result of this was to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil, to maintain the independence
of a number of Persian Gulf oil producers.
And that made sense in a bunch of ways.
But then since that time we’ve actually become a primary threat to stability in the
Middle East rather than a primary guarantor of stability in the Middle East, in that when
we invaded Iraq we set in motion a lot of events, created a much more salient internal
stability challenge for many countries in the Persian Gulf by hardening and militarizing
domestic conflicts in a lot of these countries—between Sunnis and Shiites, between different brands
within Sunni Islam—we’ve created internal instability that we can’t address very well
from outside.
The United States lacks the detailed information to understand and manipulate the politics
of these countries.
Instead we get manipulated by local actors that, in a sense, makes the instability worse.
So if you think of it this way, in the United States we spend a lot of time thinking about
and studying American politics and elections, but we don’t understand American politics
very well.
Even with all of the background cultural knowledge we have an understanding of our own politics—nobody
expected President Trump to rise as a phenomenon and become president—We don’t understand
our own politics!
How can we expect to understand and manipulate the politics of far away countries in the
Persian Gulf where we don’t know the local percentages as well, we don’t know the situation
on the ground, we don’t know what contributes to people’s political activism?
Although we can actually be fairly sure of one thing that contributes, which is, they
don’t like the feeling that they’re being pushed around by outside influences like the
United States showing up and telling them what to do.
And so we can create hostility to the United States by saying, “Oh we’re showing up
to defend the stability of Middle East oil supplies,” but we can’t actually defend
Middle East oil supplies from local instability in the Middle East very well, and so we’ve
actually created a lot of the problems in the oil market.
However, all of that said, the global oil market protects us so we don’t actually
have to worry as much about that kind of instability in any particular oil supplier.
So what happens in the oil market is when there’s a disruption in one country of the
world that reduces their oil supplies, their ability to supply the global market, to supply
consumers like us in the United States, when there’s that kind of a disruption other
suppliers compensate.
So suppliers that aren’t disrupted see an opportunity to make more money for themselves
by increasing their oil output to compensate for the fact that one of their competitors
has reduced their oil output.
So for example, when Libya exploded into civil war and then U.S. and European intervention
wrecked the state institutions of that country and made the civil war last not just a few
months in 2011 but persist for the last seven years such that Libyan oil output is way down—millions
of barrels a day down compared to what it was before 2011—didn’t lead to a huge
disruption of the oil market, it didn’t lead to a big price surge for consumers like
the United States because other producers of oil, like Saudi Arabia, like the United
Arab Emirates, like Mexico, all around the world increased their output to compensate
for the fact that Libya was producing less.
And so the natural market reaction, without the U.S. military doing anything, enables
consumers to continue consuming in the face of political military disruptions of the oil
market in one country around the world.
So we don’t need to try to use the American military to protect oil markets because the
market compensates for disruptions.
And in fact our track record of using the U.S. military to protect oil markets is lousy;
it often makes the problems worse not better.
And so there’s a clear policy adjustment the United States could make to stop using
the military for this purpose, and that would make Americans safer and continue to give
us a reliable oil supply.