Truly scary oil wars

When we think of wars in which blood is exchanged for oil, we tend to think of the U.S. sending the Marines into some Arabian desert sometime during the last 30 years. But it's important to remember that oil has been humankind's primary fuel for a century now, and the U.S. was not always the sole custodian of the international oil trade. In fact, there was a much larger, much scarier oil war that most of us are unaware of:

World War 2.

This book describes how Allied oil resources led directly to a German defeat in World War 1, and how securing control of oil was therefore essential to Germany's security thereafter. For Japan, the case was even clearer; Japan attacked the U.S. in response to our oil embargo, which was choking off its imperial ambitions in China. For both Germany and Japan, in other words, there were motives of territorial ambition and notions of racial superiority - the reasons we traditionally ascribe to the Second World War - but the need for oil was what made the war so big, so sweeping, and so destructive.

So it's worth asking: Now that China is reaching a level of technological, economic, and military parity with the U.S., are new Big Oil Wars on the horizon?

Much has been made of China's desire to see the current U.S.-led international order overturned, but the examples cited in the media have typically been fairly small beer - membership in international financial institutions, for example, or internet domains, or the global reserve currency. But the U.S. has a bigger, less obvious role in maintaining geopolitical stability - our protection of international oil markets, both through our large naval presence and through our relationships with key oil-producing countries (especially Saudi Arabia). China's naval buildup, directed at securing oil shipping lines and establishing a larger presence in the Indian ocean, could presage a bid to replace American hegemony over the oil trade. Such a bid - a struggle over control of what is still humanity's primary source of vehicle fuel - could result in the kind of large-scale industrial warfare not seen since...well...since the last time advanced nations tried to control oil by force.

We think of World War 2 as something that could only happen once. But maybe that was just because, after the smoke cleared, no other country was really strong enough to topple America from our perch atop the mountain of global oil supplies. Until now...