Transition in Power by Peter J. Hugill

Author:Peter J. Hugill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 6

The Oil War

The Struggle to Control the Middle Eastern Oil Spigot after World War I

The Oil War and the multiple struggles behind it

The third arena of struggle foreseen by President Wilson at Versailles was over oil. In this he believed America held the advantage over Britain, which suggests that, as was the case with transportation, where he thought the reverse, he was not well informed. Much has been written about this arena of struggle between America and Britain, and it comes down to two quite contradictory arguments: American “oil exhaustion” versus the “search for markets” for American oil. Much of the modern writing, exemplified by scholars such as Bromley and Stivers emphasizes the American “search for markets” for American oil, the need for bunker fuel for American ships in global trade, and the like. Such scholars reject the idea that fears of American “oil exhaustion” drove American companies to seek foreign oil.

Most oil scholars tend to ignore what seems to them a secondary struggle between America and Britain over the Middle East. In the expanded British Empire post-Versailles, the Middle East loomed large for a series of reasons: “the (anti-Hashemite) caliphate movement among Indian Moslems, the Turkish menace to Mosul, the French suspicion of the motives of Britain’s Middle Eastern policy, . . . the disturbance of the Middle East by the Wahhabi movement led by Ibn Saud . . . [and] Britain’s strong imperial interest in safeguarding the acquired strategic and economic assets against any future interference, be it by Arabs or her imperial rivals at large.” A key issue in this was the “purpose of making US recognition of Iraq conditional upon prior acknowledgment of the British mandate in Palestine . . . to consolidate the political security of the strategically important trans-desert motor and air route from the Mediterranean via Amman to Baghdad and the Persian Gulf” (Mejcher 2007, 71).

America’s relative international naivety as it emerged onto the world stage driven by Wilsonian idealism and the hangover effects of a belief from before WWI that “dollar diplomacy” could trump geopolitics tended to cause America and Britain to act at odds over oil in the early 1920s. The Turks made peace over the Mosul boundary issue in 1925 and most of the diplomatic, economic, and geostrategic issues between America, Britain, and France were resolved by the time of the Achnacarry Agreement over oil in the Middle East signed in 1928. As Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1922 Churchill realized that King Faisal of Iraq could never be recognized as representing the caliphate without inflaming Moslem opinion in India. India was far more important to the Empire than Iraq, but the problem of Moslem politics in muted form and the rise of Wahhabism were destined to remain as issues throughout the interwar years.

To observers in the early 1920s, however, the struggle between America and Britain, Standard Oil and the anglicized Royal Dutch Shell, to control global oil resources, especially those of the Middle East, seemed clear enough, and they saw that struggle in two lights: “oil exhaustion” and geopolitics.

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