Troubled Oil

 Yesterday witnessed a whipsaw for the ages on the oil markets. At the start of the day, when I looked at the news, everything sounded like it was going to be unspeakably dire. The Strait of Hormuz seemed like it was about to shut down for the first time in recorded history. Oil prices were skyrocketing. Markets were tumbling. 

I held off looking at the stock market numbers all day—in part because I couldn't bear to witness the carnage. But when I finally dared to check them after markets closed at four, I blinked in incomprehension at what I saw. Everything was green. The numbers had all gone up by the end of the day. And oil prices were back down. 

This bizarre and historic reversal—one of the biggest single-day changes in oil prices ever—seemed to stem from a number of factors at once: G7 countries suggesting they might open up strategic oil reserves; French promises to send military escorts to accompany ships through the Strait; the market's naive and inexplicable credulity toward Trump's empty and meaningless assertions in the middle of the day that the war was nearly over (he then appeared to reverse himself again after the markets closed). 

Even if markets ended in the green for one day though—there is every reason to think Trump's new forever war in the Middle East will be disastrous for energy markets over time (not to mention for the millions of people in the region and throughout the would who will be directly affected). Yesterday's events proved all over again the vulnerability of the entire global equities market to events in the Persian Gulf. The Iranian regime will almost certainly try to use this fact to gain leverage. 

The whole thing seemed like something out of the 1950s and the bad old days of petro-colonialism—Suez and that sort of thing (right down to the pledges of French military involvement to pry open the oil trade, should it become truly endangered.)

I thought back to the witticism of the artiste Bertrand—one of Kingsley Amis's most deliciously insufferable creations—about the inability of the postwar Labour government in Britain to "pour water on troubled oil." (Had I been previously familiar with the idiom "pour oil on troubled water," the cleverness of Bertrand's line would have been more impressive to me.)

Bertrand—who appears in Amis's classic novel Lucky Jim, a favorite of my adolescence, when I fancied myself an Angry Young Man in my own right—distills a number of Amis's pet peeves of the era. Lucky Jim dates from Amis's left-wing period, and so Bertrand—as the novel's villain and arch-toff—is a true-blue Tory. But he manages to combine his political conservatism with a number of other obnoxious pretensions: one of which is a tendency to view himself as a great wit. 

And so—Amis writes—after Bertrand drops his line about "troubled oil," he "look[s] quickly around the group" to make sure that they are all appreciating his pre-packaged bon mot. 

But—what on earth was Bertrand actually talking about? The answer appears to be the Abadan crisis of 1951-4, which culminated in the CIA- and MI6-sponsored overthrow of the freely-elected government of Iran. The crisis began with Prime Minister Mossadegh's efforts to nationalize British oil holdings in Iran (a.k.a. Persia). Bertrand, in his pretentious Toryism, presumably believes that a right-wing government would have made even shorter work of his efforts to assert anti-colonial national interests on behalf of the Iranian people. 

It was suddenly painfully obvious and distressing how much history has repeated itself. Bertrand speaks to us from a faculty cocktail party at a red-brick university in 1954. And yet, he is describing events that are inextricably linked to what we are witnessing today. His sneering attitude to Iranian democracy helped usher in the CIA- and MI6-backed coup in 1953 that brought the Shah's heinous and murderous regime to power. The latter's reign of terror then paved the way for the 1979 revolution, which perversely brought another heinous and murderous regime to power in its place. 

Now, the West is waging a heinous and murderous war against this heinous and murderous regime, in part to save that "troubled oil" industry in the Persian Gulf that Bertrand was talking about. France is saying: we will send troops to protect the oil trade. Meanwhile, Great Britain—led by another Labour government, whom Bertrand would no doubt hold in contempt—has made no secret of their discomfort with Trump's war of aggression, but at the same time they have cravenly refused to condemn it, and have recently opened up their military bases to support the U.S. bombing campaign.

Harold Pinter's bluntly sardonic portrayal of the real nature of the U.S.-U.K. "Special Relationship" comes to mind: "The bombs go off / The legs go off / The heads go off." It doesn't appear that this Labour government will be able to "pour water on troubled oil" either—but for quite opposite reasons to the ones Bertrand has in mind. The problem in Starmer's case is that he has become complicit in U.S. aggression (much like the Blair government that Pinter was writing about).

Wouldn't it be something if we stopped just repeating these same old mistakes? Might it not be a good idea for us Western powers to lay off the colonialism for a change? 

But then—what would happen to the oil markets? I guess our governments have collectively decided that this concern must take precedence over all other considerations—that avoiding the specter of $100 a barrel is worth the loss of—what will it ultimately be—perhaps thousands of Iranian lives, and lives throughout the entire region?