Oil: Reopening The Door

GLOBAL AGAIN

TWENTY YEARS AFTER it burst into international politics with the 1973 crisis, oil remains a strategic commodity critical in the global balance of power. But, looking toward the 21st century, the perspective has changed radically since those days when it seemed that oil power would engulf world politics.

Today, economics is taking precedence over politics. Many exporting countries court the international oil companies that they once shunned. The door that was slammed shut in the 1970s is being reopened. In fact, with the prospect of the opening of the petroleum reserves in Russia and many other countries that up to now have been politically inaccessible oil is truly a global business for the first time since the barricades went up with the Bolshevik Revolution.

In retrospect, the shocks of the 19708 can be seen as the high point of oil nationalism. It was the era when the world economy hung on the comments of oil ministers in the hallways of OPEC meetings and when the wrongs of colonialism were to be set right. It was to be the beginning of the "new international order" a zero-sum game that would see a wholesale redistribution of wealth from the North to the South and a diminution of the international stature of the United States and the other major industrial powers.

Much of that is now history. The oil exporters learned that they needed the importers as much as the importers needed them. The producers may have had oil to sell, but the consumers provided the markets. They could also provide, when needed, security. These developments lead to new questions about the very meaning of security, and what durable relationships are now possible between consumers and producers that will serve the longer-term interests of both. The Persian Gulf War of illustrates both the critical position of oil in the global balance of power and the importance of interdependence between producers and industrial consumers. There is also the increasingly important question of how to reconcile energy use and environmental imperatives.