Mohammed bin Salman and Donald Trump in 2017.
Photo: Alamy Stock PhotoIf oil didn’t exist, we’d invent it. That may sound like oil-company PR from the 1950s, but it’s true: Petroleum’s unique chemistry offers a combination of features—ease of storage and transport, safety, energy density—unmatched by any other energy form. Indeed, no alternative-energy project has yet come close to these attributes. That’s why petroleum still fuels 95% of global transportation and is the world’s biggest traded commodity—even now, during the Covid crisis.
You won’t learn any of that from Robert Vitalis, a professor of politics at Penn and former director of the school’s Middle East Center. His latest book is not about the physics of energy or the energy business; it’s about what the author calls “oilcraft,” closer not to “statecraft”—pragmatic diplomacy that treats oil as just another commodity—but to “witchcraft”: a fetishistic belief that “oil is power,” somehow a mystical thing apart.
That oil indeed remains a vital commodity, however, fuels what Mr. Vitalis characterizes, in his subtitle, as “the myths of scarcity and security that haunt U.S. energy policy.” Both “right-wing grand strategists” and “left-wing critics of capitalist imperialism,” he says, embrace these myths, which underlie America’s longstanding bipartisan pursuit of a “special relationship” with the House of Saud. The core theme of “Oilcraft” is that this policy is misguided and unnecessary.
Mr. Vitalis is withering as he deconstructs the myth of oil scarcity. He is unsparing in his contempt for many so-called experts, as when he cites an early-20th-century analysis from Arthur D. Little concluding that domestic U.S. production was in permanent decline—just before Oklahoma and Texas oilfields began their 50-year boom. Mr. Vitalis nails it when he concludes that “estimates of recoverable reserves are not a matter of geology but of knowledge (or technology) and price at a given time.” (That, in a nutshell, is the late-breaking story of shale and deep-water rigs.)
The greater part of “Oilcraft” deals with the idea that U.S. diplomacy is critical to ensuring Saudi Arabia’s willingness to provide an uninterrupted supply of oil. Mr. Vitalis makes a contrarian, libertarian case: even a post-Saudi Arabia, he says, “can be counted on to sell its oil on the world market” because oil is essentially its only source of income. Still, the scars of the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks run deep in American policy circles.
Oilcraft
By Robert Vitalis
Stanford, 224 pages, $24
Photos of the “infamous U.S. gasoline lines” of ’73 serve as a “clichéd symbol” of our need to ensure oil access. But there is, as Mr. Vitalis makes clear, more to this nationally traumatic story. Other factors triggered the crisis, notably Nixon’s decision to take the dollar off the gold standard two years earlier, “floating” it while also implementing oil price and allocation controls. Gasoline was available, just not where America needed it. (Controls survived for a decade, until Reagan dismantled them.) While none has been as dramatic as the 1973 embargo, there have been enough supply disruptions since to underscore security fears.
Mr. Vitalis identifies these fears with establishment overemphasis on maintaining access to Saudi oil fields, focusing on what he sees as corruption in our “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia. He details decades of entanglements and “transactions,” and they are legion: U.S.-to-Saudi sales of weapons, technology and securities; the University of Arkansas’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, bankrolled by Prince Bandar a month after Bill Clinton’s inauguration; even Saudi funding of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. But while such “transactions” may be unpalatable, there’s nothing unique about them—history is full of examples.
If further evidence were needed of the enduring influence of the House of Saud, consider that when, earlier this year, Saudi Arabia flooded oil markets to collapse prices, President Trump felt the need to broker a “deal” despite the U.S. shale revolution’s having unleashed Saudi-scale output. It is perhaps brave of Mr. Vitalis to note that the “transactional nature of relations with the kingdom predates the Donald J. Trump administration by decades”—but that’s pretty much the whole argument of “Oilcraft.”
Because risky entanglements are minimized when trade with questionable parties is reduced, one expects Mr. Vitalis to conclude his book with a full-throated argument for more U.S. oil production, especially as part of a Covid recovery. But he dismisses shale’s impact to focus on the Saudi problem. He mentions what he calls an old argument, that “Saudi Arabia’s oil [has] mattered more to the national interest than Israel,” and that our backing of the latter has driven jihadism. Then, without examining the astonishing implications, Mr. Vitalis notes in passing that the Kingdom’s heir apparent, Mohammed bin Salman, has turned the issue “on its head” with “his evolving rapprochement with Israel,” putting “conservative American Jewish organizations on Saudi Arabia’s side for the first time since 1948”!
If one accepts Mr. Vitalis’s scarcity/security thesis, there’s much to explore regarding American shale and geopolitics, especially given his dismissiveness of columnist Thomas Friedman’s vision that alternative energy will end “oil money” for Islamic militants. (Mr. Vitalis gets this right.) Although “Oilcraft” doesn’t explore it, it’s notable that even the most optimistic forecasts of electric-car use (300 million vehicles in a decade or so, up from today’s seven million) would shrink oil use only 10%. It’s also relevant that an electric-car boom would trigger an unprecedented jump in global mining for battery materials, from nickel and cobalt to lithium and manganese. As the United Nations has noted, this will create a new coterie of questionable suppliers including Russia, China, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Meanwhile, even if an oil-demand peak is in sight, it still leaves petroleum the world’s biggest commodity for a long, long time.
Mr. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund; and the author of the recent report “Mines, Minerals and ‘Green’ Energy: A Reality Check.”
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