The fact that Gaia, in her monstrous avatar, decided to distribute fossil fuels very unevenly across the Earth has been central to the emergence of the world’s current geopolitical order. From a vitalist point of view, it could be said that the wars of the twentieth century were won as much by the fossilized energy of botanical matter as by particular groups of humans.

In the First World War Germany’s lack of oil put it at a huge disadvantage against the Allies, more or less ensuring its defeat. The shortage of oil effectively cancelled the technological advantages Germany enjoyed at the start of the war: despite having a large fleet, for instance, it was unable to use its navy effectively because its coal-burning ships needed to refuel every eleven days. Conversely, the assured supply of American oil conferred so great an advantage on Britain and France that “it could be fairly stated that the war was won for the Western allies by tankers.” Not for nothing was it said of the First World War that Britain, France, and the United States floated “to victory on a sea of oil.”

In the Second World War the shortage of oil was even more critical to the defeat of the Axis powers. The German Luftwaffe was forced to rely on synthetic fuels derived from coal, and these could not provide the high-octane energy that was necessary for high-compression aero engines: “it was largely due to the inferior engines in German aircraft that the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain.” The shortage of oil also dictated Germany’s war strategy: it was in order to seize the oilfields of the Caucasus that the German army pushed eastward into the Soviet Union in 1942, leading to a defeat at Stalingrad from which it never recovered. Japan’s invasion of the Dutch East Indies was similarly forced by its lack of oil.

In short, over the course of the twentieth century access to oil became the central focus of global geopolitical strategy: for a Great Power, to be able to ensure or hinder the flow of oil was to have a thumb on the jugulars of its adversaries. In the first part of the twentieth century the guarantor of the flow of oil was Britain. After the Second World War, the baton was passed, along with a string of British naval bases, to the United States. The role of guarantor of global energy flows is still crucial to US strategic dominance and to its position as global hegemon.

Today, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey has pointed out, “US energy policy has become increasingly militarized and secured by the Navy, the largest oceanic force on the planet.” In the words of the historian Michael Klare, the Iraq War of 2003 marked the transformation of the US military into “a global oil protection service, guarding pipelines, refineries, and loading facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

It is important to note that the strategic value of controlling oil flows is tangentially related to the US’s energy requirements. The period in which the American military was turning into “a global oil protection service” was one in which the US was well on its way to reducing its dependence on imported oil. The fact that the US is now self- sufficient in fossil fuels has in no way diminished the strategic importance of oil as an instrument for the projection of power- it is the ability to deny energy supplies to rivals that is strategically of central importance.

What is the central idea of the passage?