The presence of a Chinese frigate off the coast of Libya last week was deeply significant as the world’s major powers position themselves to protect future supplies of fuel, says Praveen Swami.
'In the beginning,” wrote Hubertus van Mook in a rueful commentary soon after Japanese forces evicted him from his position as lieutenant-governor of the Netherlands Indies, “it was difficult to piece together this whole connected movement from the apparently disconnected moves.”
Back in 1941, a Japanese carrier fleet tore across the oceans to what is now Indonesia, seeking control of what was then the fourth-largest oil-producing state in the world, behind the United States, Iran and Romania. Oil wasn’t the only reason Japan went to war, but it was an important one: the country needed access to energy to fuel its imperialist ambitions, and a US embargo imposed that summer meant it instantly lost access to an estimated 93 per cent of its needs.
If the shots fired in Libya are not to prove the first exchanges in a future world war, now is a good time for world leaders to consider Mr Mook’s unhappy story, and to start making sense of “the whole connected movement” of events in the Middle East. The big picture is this: the world’s great powers are competing for an ever-diminishing pool of oil, making the prospect of potentially catastrophic conflicts pitting them against each other ever more likely.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/8369641/Why-oil-is-so-important-to-China.html
25/05/2012 | 14:39 uur
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