Shifting Sands and the Unreason of State: Review of Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt US Energy Policy by Robert Vitalis

Abstract

At a time of intensifying global conflict and corresponding reconfiguration of supply chains in line with national security prerogatives, the contradictions inherent in the “rules-based order” supported by and supporting US global hegemony are becoming ever more apparent and unsustainable. Robert Vitalis’s study of US–Saudi relations within the wider context of US energy policy reveals the extent to which myths intended to legitimize and enable imperialist policies have outgrown their original purpose and now threaten to destabilize the very conditions they were and remain intended to support. The inability of US political elites to recognize a reality that includes relative decline globally and socioeconomic fragility domestically, undermining efforts to sustain its outsized military presence worldwide and the appropriation of resources required to service that, are at increasing risk of triggering global catastrophe in the form of nuclear-armed warfare.