After the Pipelines: Energy and the Flow of War in the Persian Gulf

Energy’s mobility within and out of the Persian Gulf has been a structural feature of war over the last four decades in the Middle East. Since the 1970s, the region has been the epicenter of energy “crises” and struggles by various powers to control oil’s availability, its extraction, and how (or whether) it moves. American political-economic and military interests have been at the center of much of this so-called crisis. The convergence of Cold War anxieties, the uneven American approach to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a surge of resource nationalism, revolution, and a commitment in Washington, DC, to militarizing access to and managing the “free flow” of oil helped produce an arc of almost constant war. Much of the region’s contemporary conflict is rooted in the rise of the supertanker and the post-pipeline flow of oil. In the last half of the twentieth century, ensuring the movement of energy in networks beyond the pipeline produced often unseen connections between oil and war. It is a history that began with the massive militarization of regional oil producers, including selling more than $25 billion in weapons to Iran and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. Perceived failures in this period—revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979— led to permanent, ongoing interventions (Jones 2012). Although claims about American militarism in the Middle East are often attributed to terrorism, rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, and geopolitical anxieties, the mostly unseen movements of energy, and efforts to secure them, are at the heart of war in the region. For critics (and even some supporters) of America’s wars in the Middle East, it is hardly controversial to assert that there is a relationship between