The Prize

By Daniel Yergin. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. 912 pp. List $27.50; AET: $20 for one, $27.50 for two.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

This Tolstoyan replay of Anthony Sampson's classic The Seven Sisters takes us once again from the days of Mesopotamian bitumen, whale oil lamps, and western Pennsylvania 130 years ago where oil fetched $13.75 a barrel, or over $600 in modern money to Spindletop, Arabia, Alaska and points in between.

Seen as an aspect of British, Dutch and American history overseas, oil is a form of imperialism which never got beyond the pre-governmental "royal company" stage. It combines romance and great war stories with the sort of capitalist nightmare of which only Lenin could have dreamed.

Where there's muck, there's money, they say in Scotland and finally, of course, even Scotland and Norway became oil states. And where there's money, one gets treachery and consuming hatreds. Britain rescued the pearling sheikhdom of Kuwait from the Turks and from German ambitions, and inherited the enmity due creditors. In Iran, the old shah, a less mannerly man than his late, quintessentially yuppie son, started the war on Anglo-Persia that led to Mohammad Mossadegh, and finally to the inquisitional regime of the mullahs.

The imperial mentality has remained also, as the latest Gulf war attests. In 1946 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had told Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington: "Persian oil is yours; we'll share Kuwait and Iraq. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it's ours."

Yergin emphasizes how the death of coal and the reliance on oil for transportation, war and industry affected the fate of major nations. As modern countries without petroleum like Israel and Brazil have shown, you can run a country without money so long as the mint still has a printing press; but you can't get oil from the kitchen faucet. In Japan, daily oil consumption multiplied 137 times (from 32,000 barrels per day [b/d] to 4.4 million b/d) between 1949 and 1972—a reminder that the global brawl over oil largely gave birth to the nuclear power industry. (Incidentally, one of the best parts of this book is Yergin's demonstration of how the West's thumbs on Japan's oil pipe virtually forced Toyko along the path to Pearl Harbor.)

Dividing the money that was earned from the muck became all. Venezuela's 50/50 deal was soon surpassed when Getty's Chris Christensen gave a 75/25 deal to Algeria (curiously, not mentioned in this book). The cartel of the seven sisters gave place to the business roundtable of OPEC (which, as Yergin notes, was not a cartel, at least to begin with). The shah, dragging Nigeria and Venezuela into the van of his charge of the light crude brigade, spindle-topped the barrel price from $1.80 in 1970 to $11.65 in 1973. Two years later, the "spot" hit $31.75. Today's (about) $20 is, with devaluation, equal to about $12 then (perhaps $9 in purchasing power after inflation), or $3 in 1973.

Yergin is a fluid writer, a racy raconteur, an encyclopedic historiographer; but he is clearly not an historian. He is, in a sense, the Kitty Kelley of petroleum. He recounts once more the famous meeting between Roosevelt and King Abdul I Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of the modem Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on a US warship in the Great Bitter Lake. In order to reciprocate with Saudi style hospitality, the king brought his own tent, rugs and sheep, but even then an otherwise love at first sight meeting was clouded by Roosevelt's raising of the question of a state for European Jewish settlers in the Levant. But Yergin fails to see how the later creation of this settler state in the same year that Britain was forced to give independence to India and ring the tocsin of settler rule everywhere is not only an historical contrast, but the germ of the blood and bitterness which transcends the region today.

This in turn makes Yergin denigrate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as the "son of a post office clerk and a born plotter" whose pan Arab ambitions are portrayed as unworthy. The Suez War of 1956 is attributed only to France and Britain, not to Israel. There is no mention of Nassau's sending an envoy to President Linden Johnson in 1967 to confirm his willingness to readmit the UN to Sham AlShah. Israel's attack on Egypt and Syria is described as "preemptive." Six years later, the October 1973 war is, of course, the Yom Kippur War, as though some shame attached to beginning a war when as many enemy troops as possible are on leave. In short, Yergin whitewashes Israel surely the very last thing a Jewish writer who wishes credibility should do.

History is theater composed of acts of war with intermissions of peace. It is greed and treachery. The United States has betrayed some friends and been betrayed by others (virtually all the modern leaders of Iran, Israel and China, for example). Where Yergin sees history, it is only economics; and he sees Israel as the fruit of immaculate conception. A wider picture would show that there is nothing new under the sun that misguided endeavors bear the germ of their own destruction. The Prize is a highly readable edifice for area specialists; but there are some bricks without straw behind the facade.

Russell Warren Howe is a Washington-based free-lance journalist who writes regularly for newspapers in the US and abroad.