The Return of the Energy Weapon: An Old Tool Creating New Dangers

Throughout much of the modern era, limiting or disrupting the flow of energy was a highly elective tool of global power. In 1923, Admiral Reginald Bacon of the Royal Navy declared that the United Kingdom’s oil blockade of Germany in World War I was the powerful economic weapon to which “the ultimate collapse of that nation and her armies was mainly due.” A generation later, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin attributed the Allied victory over Nazi Germany to the Red Army’s success in denying Hitler access to oilfields in the Caucasus. Then there was the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which caused a nearly 300 percent rise in the price of gas in the United States and miles-long lines of cars at gas stations, an experience that has remained seared in national memory