Oil

Twenty years after it burst into international politics with the 1973 crisis, oil remains a strategic commodity critical in the global bal ance of power. But, looking toward the 21st century, the perspective has changed radically since those days when it seemed that oil pow er would engulf world politics. Today, economics is taking precedence over politics. Many export ing 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 1970s 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

Business · Political science · Global Energy and Sustainability Research · Global Energy Security and Policy · Natural Resources and Economic Development

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