A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Paperback)

Oil became for the first time an important raw material during World War I, when air, mobile tank and swifter naval warfare held the upper hand.

After WW I the British sought to secure their petroleum supplies, by creating the League of Nations, which was only a facade of international legitimacy to a naked imperial seizure of territory.
British imperial power was based on 3 pillars: control of world sea-lines, of world banking and finance and of strategic raw materials. Through its free trade policy (liberalism) it tried to preserve and to serve the interests of an exclusive private power: a tiny number of bankers and institutions of the City of London.

Its hegemony was attacked and replaced by the US after WW II, confirmed by the Bretton-Woods Agreements with the creation of the IMF and the World bank.
The new hegemon was (and is ) built on 2 pillars: military power and the dollar, but those pillars are fundamentally intertwined with one commodity: petroleum, the basis of the world economy's growth engine.

10 % of the Marshall aid to Europe after WW II served to buy US oil. The big US oil companies asked top dollars for their exports and obtained also that the aid could not be used to build refineries.

The Vietnam war constituted a massive diversion of the US industry into the production of defense goods (pillar 1).
The first oil shock of 1973 made the US banks the giants of world banking and the oil companies the giants of world industry: 'The artificial oil price inflation was a manipulation of the world economy of such a hideous dimension that it created an unprecedented transfer of the wealth of the entire world into the hands of a tiny minority. It was no less than a global world taxation through petrodollars.' (pillar 2, confirmed by Sheikh Zaki Yamani).
The oil companies also took the 'blossom of the nuclear rose'.

A cardinal goal of US foreign and military policy is control of every major existing and potential oil source. Such control would permit it to decide who gets how much energy and at what price: 'a true weapon of mass destruction'.

William Engdahl's brilliant but frightening analysis puts in the same framework Iraq, the Balkan wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergency of the oligarchs, the financial crises across Asia, the civil wars in Africa, the IMF and World bank policies, the fall of the Shah (after the collapse of the negotiations with BP), as well as the murders or 'accidental' deaths of W. Rathenau, I. Krueger, E. Mattei, J. Ponto and A. Moro.

At the start of the new millenium, the US has a near monopoly on military technology and might, commands the world's reserve currency and is able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. It fights for a near monopoly on future energy resources; in other words, for 'full spectrum dominance'.

William Engdahl has written an eye opening, fascinating but extremely dark book.

A must read.