This February saw the 75th anniversary of the surrender of the last frostbitten and starving German and other Axis soldiers to the Red Army at Stalingrad. Besides being a tragic story of human suffering, the battle is relevant today because of the reason it took place. In June 1942, Hitler sent his powerful armored columns farther east into Russia towards Stalin’s namesake city and south into the Caucasus Mountains to capture the Soviet Union’s vital oil fields . . . a commodity the Wehrmacht desperately needed to prosecute a two-continent war. Hitler never got his oil. Instead 850,000 Axis troops were erased from the order of battle, and the war turned against the Third Reich from then on. The year before the Japanese launched their own attacks bent on securing the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. Indeed, ever since the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, converted the Royal Navy from ships that ran on domestic coal to foreign oil just before the outbreak of World War I, the path of history has been that of a series of wars either started, or propelled to ever greater violence and scope, in the quest for secure energy.
Throughout the 20th Century, nations lacking indigenous oil reserves cast covetous eyes upon their energy-rich neighbors and acted accordingly. When in 1942 Rommel’s Afrika Korps attacked across the desert towards Egypt, his target was the Suez Canal, through which Britain’s Mideast oil supplies flowed, only to be defeated decisively at Alamein. Had it not been for the pervasive influence of oil, Hitler’s twin disasters in Stalingrad and North Africa may never have happened.
Oil’s importance only grew in the post-war years. The Arabian Peninsula was an inconsequential desert before the 1938 discovery of its enormous oil fields. Since then, its small petro-states have projected disproportionate influence and power in world affairs.
As a series of developments in the past weeks have shown, the United States’ push for energy independence is a vital component of its future national security. The volatility of the crude oil markets this week — up over 13% from March 1 as of this writing — have aptly demonstrated that even an outlier nation in the Mideast like Syria is close enough to the source, as well as being a potential point of conflict with Russia (the world’s largest oil producer) to be a threat to U.S. energy interests and economic growth. Furthermore, the upward impact on futures prices as a result of OPEC cutbacks as well as the predicted increase in global demand show that being self-sufficient where it comes to feeding a national thirst for 19.88 million barrels daily could shield the United States from the manipulations of producers and competition for global crude from developing nations.
Foreign oil dependency dictates how and where a nation commits national resources and treasure . . . and precious lives, witnessed in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush mobilized a coalition of military power the likes of which had not been seen since Vietnam to exorcise Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. Even Afghanistan, by virtue of its strategic proximity to Mideast and Russian oil fields, draws the U.S. into its bloody vortex of violence, tribal feuds, duplicity, and intrigue.
At one point in the mid-2000s, the U.S. imported as much as 60% of its oil, and half of that from the often-hostile OPEC cartel. The vulnerability of its energy supply was, in fact, one reason for U.S. military might. Flashpoints exist all over the globe, but none would demand a more rapid and overwhelming response than should, perhaps, the Mullahs of Tehran decide to blockade the Straits of Hormuz. So long as the United States was tethered to an energy lifeline with many competing and even openly hostile powers, it was dangerously exposed.
Thus, it should it be greeted with relief when the International Energy Agency recently reported that by 2023 the United States is projected to produce over 12.4 million barrels per day, surpassing Russia, which pumps out 11 million currently, as the world’s largest oil producer. In fact, the fracking revolution has meant that all liquids derived from oil and natural gas will top 17 million barrels daily, moving the United States ever closer to self-sufficiency when it comes to producing enough oil for refined products. Its massive oil production will profoundly reshape America’s entire approach to world affairs. Perhaps, if the IEA’s projections are accurate, we might see a time when the volatile and entangling Persian Gulf region becomes if not irrelevant then at least not so vital to America’s national interest and OPEC’s influence greatly curtailed. Energy independence means national security worth many a naval carrier group . . . and a far better investment.
What the IEA projections of both global production and consumption also tell us is that the world still very much runs on fossil fuels, and will do so for the foreseeable future. Global demand is now more than 100 million barrels daily, and that will likely rise in the next decade. In a world where not all nations have a country like Germany’s balance sheet, political will and sense of noblesse oblige to lead it into the progressive (and expensive) promised land of green energy, oil and natural gas — and who controls it — remain the ultimate arbiter of national power, and the loci of future conflicts. The less the United States need concern itself with importing other nations’ energy, and the exposure to global upheavals that go with it, the less it will be drawn into the sticky webs of foreign conflicts and heated competition for a precious natural resource . . . and the safer it will be.
Brad Schaeffer is an historian, author, musician, and trader. His eclectic body of writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, and a variety of well-read blogs and news outlets. Of Another Time and Place is his first novel, which takes place in World War II Germany and the deadly skies over the Western Front. You can pre-order his book here and here.
Feel free to drop him a note/ask him a question at: [email protected]