> Don't forget the argument of Nitzan & Bichler in The Global Political
> Economy of Israel: oil companies *like* tensions in the Middle East,
> because they raise prices and therefore profits.
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That sounds a bit too conspiratorial for my tastes. Perhaps it is true up to
a point, but it's hard to imagine oil executives don't understand that
tensions - which are, by nature, unpredictable - can become uncontrollable
and threaten the pro-Western Arab regimes who allow the multinationals to
exploit the region's rich oil resources on favourable terms. To be sure,
they've had enough unhappy experience. I doubt, for example, that the oil
companies applauded the accession to power of radical secular nationalists
like Nasser or religious ones like Khomeini, and the anti-Western programs
and instability each brought in their wake. And uncontrollable price spikes
produced by these crises can also produce recessions which quickly bring
profits down and provoke demands for alternative energy. In any case, beyond
the oil companies, the capitalists as a class and their governments
emphatically do not like these developments, and their strong support of
Israel for the past half century has been for the express purpose of
blocking them. Their reliance on Israel as a counter to radical nationalism
has produced tension in its own way - which is what our present discussion
is about - but of the kind produced by strikes or lockouts, which employers
often accept as an unavoidable alternative to more serious headaches. If the
issue is one of overthrowing anti-Western regimes, they can also accept the
attendant conflict here as well, but they have had to mostly contend with
the opposite trend since they overthrew Mossadegh, and it can hardly be
something they've welcomed.