Guest Review of “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order” by @pdxsag

[From our correspondent @PdxSag. His previous guest posts on CBS include What I've Learned the Past Decade and A "Wonderlic" Test for Agency.]

A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order starts out with a deep-dive into the British model for financial hegemony beginning with its origins in the 19th century. It follows its growth through and including World War II, culminating with the passing of the baton from the U.K. to the U.S. after World War II. 

The subtitle "Anglo-American" references the deep ties and overlapping management between the U.K pre-WWII and the U.S. post-war. Following World War II, the U.S. takes a more active roll in shaping policy and outcomes, which the result of is easy enough to see: the US is a super-power now, and the UK is decidedly not. Century of War ends, in the updated 3rd edition of 2011 (original edition was published in 1992), covering the Iraq War, its aims and consequences.

First, what is the British model? Very simply, it is to position yourself at the nexus of trade in a critical resource and make your currency the reserve asset for international commerce. Then you can profit from seigniorage.

Since the industrial revolution, energy generally and petroleum specifically is the critical resource. However its scarcity has been greatly exaggerated. The common theme through the 20th century was elaborate machinations to keep petroleum a scarce resource, mainly by keeping competitors out of the oil market.

Not since I reviewed A Bottle of Lies for CBS has one of my reviews felt so eerily timely. Consider that last month, CBS wrote the long essay on Cornucopianism. Then last week, USAID's cover was blown by DOGE and Elon Musk, and last night I listened to a podcast between Grant Williams (Boomer) and Demetri Kofinas (Millennial) as Williams came to terms with his disillusionment in the American Experiment (my words, not his) owing to the Trump meme coin.

Kofinas worked through his disillusionment some time ago and firmly pin-points the failure of the American experiment on the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq which was done under fraudulent pretenses.

As a Gen X, well, we stopped harboring idealism in our teens (years before 9/11 was a thing) and are simply un-disillusionable. Nonetheless, I definitely felt sympathy for Grant and Demetri. I wanted to jump in there and say, guys, guys, guys... the Iraq war wasn't the beginning at all. You should read Century of War. It has the the receipts.

The wrinkle of the British model is two-fold: how do you keep a resource's supply critical (ie. in a shortage), and how do you keep yourself at the supply's nexus. The answer to those questions is... Statecraft.

A nasty business statecraft is. It is lies, deceit, wars of convenience, and lying to your own people as a matter of course. All while you purport to grand ideals of fairness, democracy, and the rights of man. It is quite literally the stuff disillusionment is made from. Pity on us all.

Century of War is the receipts on a century of Anglo-American statecraft. (Nb.: we are aware that Normies are propagandized into calling these "conspiracy theories." However, the last 5 years have shown, if nothing else, conspiracy theories are never more than one undauntable autist away from documenting them to be conspiracy fact. In this case, Engdahl is our undauntable autist. He has sourced citations and footnotes for all of these events. In full disclosure, we mostly skimmed the footnotes and didn't follow citations.)

Here are some of the biggest:

• Interference with German/Russian relationship after WWI – The Treaty of Versailles was the original IMF loan/student loan scam where no matter how hard Germany worked, they would never be able to earn enough hard currency to pay it off. The terms for late-payment were too onerous and the time between recessions too short to ever get it paid down. The Germans attempted to work-around the situation by, among a litany of maneuvers, setting up an oil barter program with the Russians. When the British got wind of the agreement they quickly scotched it and soon after came down on Germany harder by trumping up yet more onerous financial requirements.
• Interference with Italy after WWII – An Italian, Enrico Mattei, almost single-handedly developed a domestic oil industry and successfully reduced Italy's reliance on middle eastern oil and American finished oil products. He was credited more than anyone else for the Italian post-war economic miracle. In October 1962, at the height of his success, as he was preparing to meet with US President Kennedy to discuss a detente between Italy and US' oil companies, he died in an airplane accident under mysterious circumstances. President Kennedy, for his part, would die just 13 months later, November 1963, under no less suspicious circumstances.
• Club of Rome – A Kissinger op, the Tri-lateral Commission needed a plausible cover story for nations of the world to throttle their growth. Over-population and the world running out of natural resources, oil most of all, fit the bill. This helpfully reduced potential competition on resources with the West, while doing nothing to advance supply away from the existing establishment under US control.
• 1973 oil boycott – Kissinger deliberately mis-relayed intelligence and communications between Israel and Egypt which directly lead to the outbreak Yom Kippur War. He then directed the Shah of Iran to launch the oil boycott in 1973 in response to the US siding with Israel. This immediately repriced oil which helpfully made the newly developed oil fields in Alaska and the North Sea economically viable.
• 1978 oil boycott – British Petroleum took an extremely hard line negotiating a renewal of their oil lease with the Shah of Iran. At the same time, British and US intelligence services advanced the propaganda campaign of Islamist agitators, as well as being closely embedded with the Shah's secret police where they recommended increasingly brutal repression tactics which only served to fuel the Islamist propaganda. George Ball, a member of Bilderberg Group and the Tri-lateral commission and Under Secretary of State, recommended Khomeini over the Shah.
• Three Mile Island op – In 1979, the world smarting from two oil price shocks in 7 years, a nuclear reactor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, had an improbable sequence of events culminating in an atmospheric release of nuclear radiation fall-out. Additional improbabilities: the newly formed agency, FEMA, whose existence according to the executive order that created it did not begin until April 1, had actually started its operation 5 days early on March 27, the day before the accident on March 28, and thus able to swoop in and assert authority and take control of the situation, including, most of all, censoring all information from plant workers to the media, thereby creating an information vacuum in which sensational rumors could run unchecked amongst the public. Earlier in that same month of March, the movie “China Syndrome” was released pre-suading the American public on the worst-case scenario for a nuclear accident. Finally, in the ensuing investigation, while industrial espionage was listed as one of the six possible root-causes, it alone of the six was never actually investigated. The sum total of TMI was that nuclear energy was suddenly verboten in the West and most of the developing world.
• Saddam Hussein rug-pull – It's often told now that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after an in-over-her-head diplomat intimitated to him that the US would not intervene in an Iraqi-Kuwaiti war. A proto-DEI hire accidentally kicking off a war certainly strokes the sensibilities of many on the popular right today. However in consideration of US petrodollar statecraft and Kissinger's m.o. leading to the Yom Kippur War, it is more believable she was directed to set-up Saddam by giving him the go-ahead so that a shocked, shocked I tell you! George H.W. Bush could invade Iraq and put their oil industry under the US thumb for a decade.
• Second Iraq War – At the peak of US power, with the peace dividend from the collapse of the Soviet Union reaching its full fruition and the US budget ever so briefly in surplus and the deficit going down for the first time in decades, in response to the WTC terrorist attacks, planned by a Saudi royal family member living in the mountains of Afghanistan, the US goes to war in Iraq over fraudulant charges of weapons of mass destruction. It takes Iraqi oil production all but offline, plus creates a host of other regional instability issues. Note, at the time a common charge among the always wrong left-wing crowd both in the US and abroad was that US wanted to “steal Iraqi oil.” On the contrary, we can see that stealing the oil would not help US statecraft in the least. They didn't need it stolen. They needed it stranded.

The common thread through these events is the need to keep petroleum as an artificially scarce resource. Additionally, is the need to keep Anglo-Americans at the nexus of the physical petroleum trade, which is to say oil moves on the ocean and is subject to the US Navy's good graces. This is known as the petrodollar.

A perennial theme that I left out of the above list is Eastern European pipelines that always fall-through due to extenuating geo-political circumstances. Pipelines running through non-aligned countries really make the elites unhappy. One example would be the Kosovo War, but the best is the recent Nordstream pipeline episode.

The not so obvious implication in all this is that it takes a lot of work to maintain the scarcity of oil and hence the supremacy of the dollar. My theory is that if the scarcity of oil breaks down, so will the dollar.

The world is not running out of oil. It is especially not running out of fossil fuels, more broadly. The genie of that realization is not going back into the bottle. And thus the petrodollar is nearing the end of its line.

To be sure, other people have been warning of this outcome too. As Cornucopists ourselves now, we hopefully will be better prepared than most to accept this new and, frankly, inconvenient fact.

Fun aside: Herman Kahn gets a name drop in Century of War. Additionally, Malthus is called out as a fraud (pages 177-178). Malthus' paper, 1798, was a flimsy plagiarization and adaptation of Venetian Giammaria Ortes paper some 20 years prior which itself was written as an attack on Benjamin Franklin's 1755 positive population theory.

It certainly has some unsettling implications for any investment theses predicated on a return of oil to inflation adjusted prices commensurate with the 1970's, or even the late 2000's. This is not to say oil is a bad investment. Rather, one must avoid the oil bugs bemoaning price manipulation. They without realizing it, must wait for an exogenous supply crunch for their investments to become profitable. Of course, over the full cycle, including the cost of capital, they never are. Most oil and gas producers are trading sardines. Instead, we choose to pay-up for the highest-quality, lowest-cost producers and royalty streams. Make money on volume and don't stress about the commodity price.

Next, I hypothesize that Latin America will stop self-sabotaging their countries with bone-headed politics. That had been the model, because CIA was in there funding left-wing agitators and a coup every time they got someone competent and pro-growth in charge. Instead, they will start growing organically and moving up the development index curve. They will start consuming resources more commensurate with their share of the population. For resource investors, that is a good thing.

Expect that U.S. statecraft is not going to disappear. It will by necessity pivot away from oil scarcity being the foundation of U.S. hegemony. However, seigniorage is heady stuff. No country gives that up laying down.

Personally, I expect crypto-fiat to be what comes next (if the last decade doesn't feel like a long-con pre-suasion op for digital money, I don't know what else to tell you). But I am humble enough to know I have no idea what the end-game really is or how we get there.

If forced to guess, I'd say a three tier system: legacy Bitcoin which will be preferred by those outside U.S. direct sphere of influence; a Greenback coin for people and companies within the U.S. sphere of influence, including close allies such as Western Europe, Japan, Singapore, the Urban Middle East; and a central bank clearing house coin for balance of payments between countries, much as gold functioned prior to 1971.

We have to assume that a repricing of gold does not fit with US seigniorage interests. Indeed, if it were that easy, it would have been done in 1971, if not earlier. Gold will likely be a part of the final solution, thousands of years of history see to that, but to expect it to solve the whole or even the majority of the reserve currency problem seems long odds against the experience of 92 years without it in a modern, post-scarcity economy.

Finally, if nothing comes next, that's bad for the U.S. dollar far more than it's bad for oil. And bad for the U.S. dollar could be good for U.S. citizens. Empires aren't cheap. As we are seeing with DOGE, they run through a process of shuffling lots of money around in a very opaque manner and those with connections skim a nice little vig for themselves. If they are forced to stop shuffling money and there's no vig being siphoned, that value in the economy doesn't disappear, it stays allocated to the creators of it. It makes for a rocky adjustment period, but after the adjustment there will be a bigger economic pie than there had been before.