David Harvey
THE NEW IMPERIALISM
Afterword to Foreign Language Editions
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The question of the exact state of global oil supplies and reserves remains as murky as ever. In my initial text, I stated, for example, that oil reserves in Canada are running down. If, however, the difficult-to-extract oil in the tar sands is included then Canada’s oil reserves are very substantial. Russia has stepped into the world oil market in a very big way in the last year or so (and is beginning to acquire the status of an oil-exporting economy with all the attendant dangers and difficulties that attach thereto). And the sudden interest of the Bush Administration for military bases in Africa (particularly West Africa and Angola) almost certainly has far more to do with the substantial oil reserves there than with the ritual excuse of the war against terrorism or the ostensible embrace of humanitarian concerns and the need to confront the AIDS epidemic. As a footnote we now know from recently released British intelligence records that the US was prepared to occupy the oilfields of Saudi Arabia. Kuwait and Abu Dhabi in the crisis of 1973. The inference that the reason the Saudis agreed to recycle petrodollars through US banks was to stave off such a threat looks entirely plausible. With respect to the oil situation more generally, the best that anyone can do is to recognize the volatility of the oil picture but also accept that no matter what happens the Middle East is a crucial region in relation to the global economy and that the US presence in the region, which has been steadily escalating since 1945, will not diminish in the near future. Whoever wins the next US presidential election is unlikely to reverse the US drive to control the region and its oil reserves.
full: <http://www.colorado.edu/geography/dart/resources/harvey_imperialism_afterward.htm>
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