United States Foreign Oil Policy since World War I: For Profits and Security (review)
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Given the salience of the topic, it probably seemed like a good idea to publish a second edition of Stephen Randall's book some twenty years after the first. In hindsight, it was not. The three new substantive chapters, which purport to cover the period from 1950 to 2004, are completely different than the first nine chapters, covering the period 1919 to 1948. The new chapters are not rooted in the same kind of primary research and do not deal with issues at anything like the same level of analysis. The result is therefore disappointing.
The first edition of the book was based on extraordinary primary research in a dozen archives and hundreds of government documents. Randall had spent years mastering the detail of business-government interaction in foreign oil policy during thirty years of wartime and interwar history. Starting with the early development of overseas (that is, non-U.S.) oil exploration, production, and trade, Randall carefully examined whether U.S. policy was designed to help U.S. oil companies, or whether the companies served the interests of U.S. policy. His analysis carried the reader through the ups and downs in business-government relations during the Hoover era of growth, then depression; efforts to deploy production and marketing cartels to control excess output in the Middle East; wartime mobilization and an attempt to create a national oil corporation; difficulties with internationalism and Anglo-American cooperation; and the resurgence of private enterprise after the war.
Throughout this thirty-year analysis, Randall addressed human interactions at a micro level—relations between oilmen and government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, he did so in exceedingly long paragraphs, with little effort to organize ideas and themes. There were few charts or tables, and it was at times difficult to know how much was being produced and exported, by whom, and from which countries. And it was even difficult to know much about the policy issues, or how they related to the formulation of domestic energy policies.
In the three new chapters, Randall moves to a more macro level—breezily floating through major oil issues, wars, and relations with Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. There are at least a few tables and charts to show output, reserves, and prices. But there is little on relations between industry and government players. The research was not done. In his conclusion, Randall offers a more conceptual view about oil policy involving "a blend of Jeffersonian liberalism with the statism of twentieth-century reformers" (p. 322). The tension between these two values resulted, [End Page 670]on the one hand, in the rejection of a state-controlled Petroleum Reserve Corporation and, later, a strong Department of Energy, but also a continuing yet ineffectual recognition of foreign oil's importance to U.S. security. Imports have kept rising as a percentage of domestic consumption, and the United States is hopelessly mired in Iraq. Randall's conclusion mentions the commitment to Israel and the "tightrope" the United States is walking. The tightrope is becoming a thin thread, indeed.
Dr. Vietor is Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. His books include Energy Policy in America(1987), Contrived Competition(1994), and (with R. E. Kennedy) Globalization and Growth(2000).
