Geopolitics Came Up with the Oil…

May 26, 1908 — the first major oil discovery in the Middle East, in Persia, and the moment energy became foreign policy, concession, dependency, and moral theatre

On May 26, 1908, oil erupted from the ground in Persia.

Officially, it was an energy discovery. In reality, the twentieth century had just found one of its favourite excuses.

From that black liquid came concessions, “stability,” foreign-policy doctrines, useful dictators, strategic friendships, military protection, moral theatre, and the long, elegant art of pretending that greed becomes respectable once it has been translated into policy language.

Much of today’s world still runs on that first lesson.

Washington, naturally, has refined the method to near-theological perfection.

Iranian oil can be treated as a moral emergency. Venezuelan oil, under the right licence, may suddenly become a pragmatic necessity.

One barrel threatens civilisation. Another barrel, if routed through the proper paperwork, helps stabilise the market.

How civilised.

This is the great miracle of modern foreign policy: the oil itself does not have to change. Only the adjective does.

Hostile oil. Strategic oil. Sanctioned oil. Licensed oil. Dirty oil. Necessary oil.

The vocabulary changes. The appetite does not.

And somewhere beneath all the speeches about democracy, security, human rights, energy transition, and responsible leadership, the old sentence keeps breathing:

someone sits on the resource, someone else wants it, and a third person is hired to explain why this is not quite what it looks like.

The roots were not hidden. They were drilled into the ground.

There are days when the earth gives us something, and we immediately prove we were not worthy of the gift.

It had already given us gold. That, too, caused problems. It had given us coal. From that came the Industrial Revolution, factory chimneys, lung disease, and railway romance — which is to say that humanity, as usual, interpreted the gift in a rather mixed fashion. But on May 26, 1908, in Persia, something especially dark rose from beneath the ground.

Oil.

Black, thick, sticky, useful.

In other words, exactly the kind of gift from which humanity first makes industry, then a navy, and finally a moral exception.

The problem with oil was that it was useful for far too many things. It could heat, move ships, feed fleets, accelerate industry, dream cars into existence, make countries dependent, bring down governments, and still allow everyone to speak of it as though it were merely an economic matter. Few substances have entered the history of hypocrisy with better paperwork.

That day, the earth did not merely give oil.

It gave an excuse.

That was the real discovery. Not the geological one, but the political one. Humanity already knew that power loved maps. It loved borders, ports, straits, routes, railways, canals, and every point that could be called strategically important with a sufficiently serious face. But oil introduced a new quality. Suddenly foreign policy began bubbling up from the ground.

The British Empire, naturally, recognised this quickly. Empires rarely require geological training to smell where profit begins. They have a particularly refined sense for anything valuable located beneath someone else’s soil. In such cases, the civilising mission tends to concentrate with remarkable precision on the exact territory where something can be extracted. Conscience, that delicate little clerk, is temporarily sent on leave — or at least transferred to the press office.

Concession is a beautiful word: dry enough to hide greed, legal enough to make robbery look like a virtue at the negotiating table. It does not say: we have come because we want what is yours. It says: legal agreement. It does not say: the stronger party is now taking what it wants, only in better clothes. It says: business arrangement. Many of history’s greatest courtesies began this way: contract, agreement, cooperation, development, investment.

If one listens carefully enough, behind such words there is often the sound of a distant drilling rig.

Oil soon taught the modern world that morality is a flexible concept. If a country is poor but has no oil, it may be discussed movingly at human rights conferences. If it has oil, the conversation suddenly becomes more responsible. More nuanced. More strategic. The dictator who yesterday was an unpleasant character becomes today a factor of stability, and tomorrow — provided there is enough oil beneath him — a moderate partner. The corrupt elite that yesterday was a scandal becomes a negotiating counterpart. The people who yesterday deserved freedom become, today, a rather complicated domestic situation.

Oil did not merely lubricate engines.

It lubricated language.

Raw interest suddenly became energy security. Fear became strategic foresight. Intervention became stabilisation. Greed dressed itself so well that, after a while, it seemed to believe it was a diplomat.

Much of the twentieth century was spent finding more respectable ways to describe this black liquid. Not war for oil, but regional security. Not a sphere of influence, but energy stability. Not a coup, but the restoration of order. Not exploitation, but partnership. Not dependence, but supply chain. One of civilisation’s great talents is its ability to wrap naked interest in language so refined that it appears ready for a diplomatic dinner, with greed given its own fork beside the plate.

Persia, later Iran, became almost a textbook case in this regard. First the concession. Then the company. Then the British state interest. Then the Iranian question, which was actually very simple: whose land, whose wealth, whose profit, whose right to decide? Empires generally dislike answering such questions in too much detail, because the answer would contain “they” far too often, while the profit too often contains “we.”

When Mosaddegh later said that Iranian oil should be an Iranian matter, the world suddenly became very nervous. Grammatically, the sentence was rather simple. Iranian oil belonged to Iran. But geopolitics rarely enjoys simple sentences when they cause losses. At such moments, complex analyses appear. The communist threat. Stability. Responsible international action. And that old, well-dressed panic great powers feel when someone begins taking sovereignty a little too seriously in his own country.

The coup thus became not merely an Iranian story. It became a modern parable about how beautiful democracy is — until it starts making decisions on its own soil that appear on foreign balance sheets.

From there, the road led straight into the rest of the world. The Middle East slowly ceased to be merely a geographical region and became a service station for the modern conscience. Stability was measured by the barrel. Moral flexibility by the gallon. World leaders spoke solemnly of peace, while in the background everyone understood that the price of peace often depended on the price of crude oil, and on who happened to be sitting on the land from which it could be extracted.

Meanwhile, modern man got into his car.

That is the finest piece of black humour in the whole story. At the end of the great geopolitical games stands the man at the pump, who does not want an empire, a coup, or a foreign-policy doctrine. He merely wants to get to work, preferably without that small yellow light appearing on the dashboard. He fills the tank, pays, mutters, drives home, and watches the news about countries he often hears about only when something has happened to the oil, the pipeline, the strait, or that particular stability which always seems to cost other people suspiciously dearly.

Then came the climate crisis, and oil finally became not only politically but morally uncomfortable. At this point, civilisation did what it so often does best: it tried to continue the same way of life in cleaner packaging. Electric cars, green transition, sustainable growth, carbon neutrality, conferences, logos, smiling chief executives, new supply chains. Guilt no longer smokes quite so visibly. This is, admittedly, progress. Conscience, too, looks better under LED lighting.

The engine became quieter. The mine moved farther away. And conscience once again found itself a more comfortable geography.

Only the old questions remained.

Where is the energy? Who owns it? Who pays for it? Who stays silent about it? Who explains it? Who suffers it?

More than a century has passed since oil first erupted from Persian ground, yet the story has not really grown old. It has merely changed form. The black liquid taught the world that behind the comfort of modern life there is always a distant landscape, a silent people, a contract, a warship, a banker, a consultant, a politician, and someone at the end saying: it is a complicated question.

But it is not always complicated.

Sometimes it is only that the earth gave something, and man immediately began behaving as though it belonged to him.

Oil came from the depths.

Geopolitics had only been waiting for a surface.

Picture: British Indian troops at Abadan Refinery, 1941. By then, oil had long ceased to be merely a substance. It had become something soldiers guarded.