F. William Engdahl A Century of War ANGLO-AMERICAN OIL POLITICS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GmbH F. William Engdahl TABLE OF CONTENTS A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics and : the New World Order. Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GmbH Title of the German Edition: Mit der Olwaffe zur Weltmacht, , Foreward: 7 der Weg zur neuen Weltordnung. 1. The Three Pillars of the British Empire 8 © Copyright 1992 by Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GmbH, , _ The Empire Needs a New Strategy 8 All rights reserved. _ Free Trade and the Sinews of British Power 10 st 1 English edition published 1993 t _ Britain's "Informal Empire" 12 - The Great Depression of 1873 16 Distribution in the USA and Canada by Paul & Company Publishers Consortium, Inc., Concord, Massachusetts " 2. The Lines are Drawn: Germany and the Geopolitics of the " Great War" 20 -Germany's "Wirtschaftswunder" 20 - A Berlin bank panic 23 - A Necessity of Ship and Rail Infrastructure 25 3. A Global Fight for Control of Petroleum Begins 29 - A British Admiral sees beyond lamp oil 29 - D'Arcy captures the secret of the burning rocks 30 - The rail from Berlin to Baghdad 32 - The new Dreadnaughts 36 Cover picture: On March 11,1917 British troops under command ~ Sir Edward GreY's fateful Paris triP 37 of Major-General Stanley Maude capture Baghdad in a military " Fashoda, Witte, Great Projects and Great Mistakes 38 expedition which drew forces away from the European theater at a critical moment in the war. 4- Oil Becomes the Weapon, c „-u u• r> o -u v u u •* D r the Near East the Battleground 45 Source: Bildarchiv Preuisischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. ° - A bankrupt Britain goes to war 45 - Oil in the Great War 47 - England's Secret Eastern War 50 - Arthur Balfour's strange letter to Lord Rothschild 54 - Balfour backs the new concept of Empire 55 5. Combined & Conflicting Goals: U.S. rivals Britain 60 - Morgan finances the British war 60 - New York Banks challenge City of London 65 Typesetting: Dinges & Frick, Wiesbaden - England Moves for Oil Supremacy 68 Printing: Ebner Ulm - Churchill and the Arab Bureau 70 Printed in Germany - A Battle for Control of Mexico 71 ISBN 3-925725-19-9 - The secret to British Oil control 72 6. The Anglo-Americans Close Ranks 77 10. Europe, Japan and a Developing Sector Response to the Oil Shock 167 - A conference in Genoa 77 - Sinclair and the American bid , 78 - The Petrodollar Monetary Order 167 - Germany tries to Outflank the British 80 devastates the developing world - Military Occupation of the Ruhr 82 - An unusual press conference in Bonn 173 - The Real Origins of Weimar Hyperinflation 83 - From Colombo comes a political earthquake 175 - The Anglo-Americans Red 87 - Atoms for Peace becomes a casus belli 181 - Deterding, Montagu Norman and - Gold, dollar crisis & dangerous new potentials Schacht's 'Hitler Project' 88 from Europe 185 - The "Crash of 1979": Iran, Volcker and Harrisburg 188 7. Oil and the New World Order of Bretton Woods 99 11. Imposing The New World Order: - A New Empire rises from the ashes of war 99 The Gotterdammerung 199 - The Dollar Standard, Big Oil and the New York banks... 101 - Marshall Plan forms postwar oil hegemony.. 103 - Volcker borrows a British model 199 - Power of New York banks tied to oil 104 - Gunboat diplomacy and a Mexican initiative 205 - Mohammed Mossadegh takes on Anglo-American oil... 106 - Wall St. replays the 1920's IMF-style 215 - Italy attempts independence in oil, development 112 - Reagan's chickens come home to roost 223 - Mattel's bold development initiative 114 - 'We'll get by with a little help from our friends...' 231 - The fall of a wall panics some circles 233 8. A Sterling Crisis and the Adenauer-de Gaulle Threat .... 121 - Saddam: the instrument for creation of The New World Order 237 - Continental Europe emerges from the rubble of war 121 - The target: an independent Europe and Japan 243 - Anglo-American 'Grand Design' against Adenauer's Europe 123 -1957: America at the turning point 124 Postscriptum 248 - 'That '58 Chevy...' 126 - The dollar wars of the 1960's 127 - The Vietnam option is taken 130 - Beginnings of America's internal rot '.. 133 Appendices: 255 - Sterling, the weak link, breaks 136 I. Table of Important Dates 255 - De Gaulle is toppled 141 II. 1973 Trilateral Membership 265 III. 1973 Bilderberg Saltsjoebaden Membership 267 9. Running the world economy in reverse: Who really made the 1970's oil shocks? 154 - Nixon pulls the plug 154 About the Author 269 - An unusual meeting in Saltsjoebaden 148 - Dr. Kissinger's Yom Kippur oil shock 150 - The economic impact of the oil shock 153 Index of Names 271 - Taking the bloom off the 'nuclear rose' 156 - Developing the Anglo-American Green agenda 158 - Population control becomes US 'national security'issue 162 Foreword uring the course of this century, our world has endured two Dwars, each of a scale more devastating than any before. Since the formal end of hostilities and the founding of a new world order based on the monetary arrangement drafted at Bretton Woods by American and British negotiators in 1944, the world has experienced new forms of almost continuous wars, conflicts constrained only by the realities of the nuclear age, though conflicts in human cost far more devasta­ ting than the century's two world wars. On January 16,1991 began the most awesome deployment of military firepower in the history of air warfare. The nominal target of the hundreds of advanced aircraft I dedicate this book to: carrying an estimated half million tons of bombs in the US-led as­ sault, was a small nation of some 16 million inhabitants, in land area only slightly larger than the state of California. The decision to preci­ O.T. Rishoff (1876-1956), who first gave the author pitate full-scale war against Iraq, however, was not rooted in the ag­ a fascination for history, gressive move by Iraq to take neighboring Kuwait on August 2,1990. Frederick R< Wills (1928-1992) who used history, Rather, the roots of that Gulf War must be understood in a history re­ in order to change it for the better, aching back a full century and more. And to my wife Inge, whose patient support Today, it is almost difficult to recall the universal burst of optimism made the creation of this book possible. which greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The Bal­ kans are once again the center of a cruel and bloody series of wars which are creating tragic unrest across Europe. Western Europe is it­ self reeling from economic recession or even depression, from repea­ ted attacks on its own currency stability, from new aggressive trade sanctions on agriculture, steel and other export products. The indu­ strial investment boom which many had expected with the opening of the east to democracy has yet to be seen. As well, the economies of the United States and most of the English-speaking world are suffe­ ring from the deepest economic contraction since the 1930's, with no end in sight. How can it be that such a reversal of prospects has taken place in only three short years? Indeed, there is a single common thread linking today's tragic events in the Arabian Gulf, the unrest in the Balkans and Continental Europe, and the events leading up to the two earlier periods of breakdown and world war in this century. Our story is not the one conventionally presented in most history books. To many it may in fact seem implausible, even fantastic. The invisible thread connecting seemingly disparate events over the past century and more, is the real subject of this text. Our interpretation of the "facts" involved in this history is clearly controversial. The reader must judge if we have made our case convincingly. F. William Engdahl, January, 1993 CHAPTER ONE: 1 - THE THREE PILLARS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 9 the Manchester textile industry. English manufactures had led the world for decades. But behind her apparent status as the world's pre-eminent The Three Pillars power, Britain was rotting internally. The more that British mer­ chant houses extended credit for world trade, and City of London of the British Empire banks funneled loan capital to build railways in Argentina, the United States and Russia, the more the domestic economic basis of the English nation-state deteriorated. Few understood how ruth­ lessly lawful was the connection between the two parallel pro­ The Empire Needs a New Strategy cesses at the time. Since the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, which carved up post- Napoleonic Europe, with the diplomatic maneuvering of British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, the British Empire had exacted O OTHER ELEMENT has shaped the history of the past rights to dominate the seas in return for the self-serving "conces­ one hundred years so much as the fight to secure and con­ sions" granted to Habsburg Austria and the rest of Continental N trol the world's reserves of petroleum. This book is in­ European powers, which concessions served to keep central Con­ tended to shed light on how political and economic power around tinental Europe divided, and too weak to rival British global ex­ this raw material, petroleum, has been shaped by interests princi­ pansion. pally under the control of two governments—England, and later, British control of the seas, and, with it control of world shipping the United States. Britain, approaching the end of the 1890's, was trade, was thus to emerge after Waterloo as one of the three pillars the pre-eminent political, military, and economic power in the of a new British Empire.