Petroleum exploration, production, and transportation have always required extensive, expensive physical infrastructure, which can be damaged by military aggression. The oil industry has also persistently relied on access to large amounts of foreign capital, which investors are likely to withhold from conquered territories. Hence, the invasion, occupation, international, and investment obstacles to fighting for petroleum have always been high. Unlike other resource wars, classic oil wars have never paid.
Meanwhile, research on other resources suggests that states’ reluctance to fight for oil may not be exceptional. Aaron Wolf has found that international “waterwars”—another type of resource conflict that figures prominently in popular and academic narratives—are far rarer than most people assume. Between 1918 and 1994, states fought no wars for water and only seven water skirmishes: the conceptual equivalent of oil spats. This raises another question: If states refrain from wars to acquire the “water of life” and from wars to obtain “the lifeblood of industrially advanced nations,” which natural resources do they fight for? Perhaps we have overestimated all resources’ contributions to interstate conflict.
Actors’ strategic deployment of oil war narratives was particularly evident in the Chaco case, presented in chapter 5. Huey P. Long, the Bolivian and Paraguayan governments, and members of the Bolivian opposition all used this storyline to advance their parochial interests: lambasting Standard Oil, attracting international support to their side of the conflict, and undermining the Salamanca regime. The Bolivian people also eventually embraced the narrative to bring order and meaning to a catastrophic and apparently irrational event. Many of these actors knew that the oil war interpretation was false. They reiterated it, nonetheless, because it served their interests.
Aus: The Oil Wars Myth von Emily Meierding.