Doug Henwood:
How is this control going to be exercised? Will Washington tell oil companies not to sell to China? Will the spot and futures markets all run through Dick Cheney's office?
^^^^ CB: On "control" from a different angle (not so much the U.S. withholding from China), if the state power that controls the land where the oil is does not have some potential to control the flow of that oil, why didn't the U.S. just let Iraq conquer Saudi Arabia back in 1990 or so ?
Is, for example, the Venezuelan state's control over the oil in its territory in some sense potentially economically and politically significant ?
Just as the U.S. perpetrates economic blockades on countries ( Cuba, Iraq) for political purposes, might a state power controlling oilfields use extraordinary measures of "seller's withholding" to political ends some time in the future. The specifics might not be foreseeable right now, but the U.S. would just know that it must assert and establish its military control over the major oil lands now for general control purposes in the future so as not to be vulnerable to "reverse blockades" ( I can't think of what the term would be for withholding a necessary resource for political purposes).