There is an unfinished book by Pier Paolo Pasolini that today sounds like a prophecy. It’s called Oil. A visionary, dark novel, where oil is not just a raw material but a metaphor of modern power. For Pasolini it even represented the new global fascism: the symbol of consumerism that devours the roots of peasant civilization and replaces memory with profit.
Half a century later, that insight seems to materialize in the headlines every day. Oil, oil, oil. We read it in the economic news, but also in the political and military ones. The price of petrol explodes, gas bills rise, tens of thousands of oil tankers are anchored in front of the Strait of Hormuz, and suddenly we understand that behind a fuel pump lies a global geopolitical chessboard.
It’s certainly not the first time. Black gold, yesterday as today, lies beneath everything. He is behind the tensions with Venezuela that led to the American raid and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, brought back to America in chains like Vercingetorix by Caesar in Rome. It is behind the permanent clash with the ayatollahs’ Iran. And before that he was behind the Gulf War against Iraq in 1990 and that of 2003, the crises in the Middle East, the rivalries between great powers. It is the invisible thread that connects economies, conflicts and diplomacies.
Just look at a map. In the Persian Gulf there is a passage as narrow as a funnel – the Strait of Hormuz. An enormous share of the world’s oil passes through there, and almost 90 percent of the energy exports of some Gulf countries. Much of that crude finds its way to Asia, especially to China. It is the real bottleneck of the global economy. If Iran decided to close it permanently, the planet would enter apnea. That’s why Trump is sending the marines to get it.
With oil you can blackmail the world. Those born in the 1960s and 1970s remember the first time this truth became apparent. It was December 1973. It was snowing in European cities and in the streets there was an unreal scene: stopped cars, streets invaded by pedestrians, bicycles, people on horseback, carriages, improvised sleighs. The famous Sundays on foot, which were followed by alternate Sundays, a sort of automotive roulette. For the children it was almost a party: someone brought out a cart, others cross-country skis. It seemed like a romantic interlude. Then the bill arrived.
It all began on October 6, 1973 when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The war lasted a few weeks but produced a global economic earthquake. The West discovered globalization (which according to Federico Rampini with Trump (he pronounces it “Ciomp”) is the terminus of a new era, and which historians date precisely from those distant years, the Seventies. The Arab countries of OPEC decided to use oil as a political weapon. Embargo against the United States, guilty of supporting Israel, and pressure on Europe, the most fragile because totally dependent on raw materials. As we can see, globalization may have ended, but the picture has not changed.
The price of crude oil quadrupled in just a few months. Endless queues at the distributors. Skyrocketing inflation. The West discovered a truth it had previously ignored: its well-being depended on a black liquid pumped beneath distant deserts.
It didn’t end there. Six years later came the second shock. In 1979 the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran and brought Ruhollah Khomeini to power. Iranian oil production collapsed and markets reacted with panic. Even though the actual loss of crude oil was limited, prices doubled. Then a new word was born: stagflation. Prices rising as the economy grinds to a halt. From that moment on, oil officially became a lever of global power.
Subsequent crises confirmed this. Time after time, the world has discovered that oil and its smaller fossil brother, methane, are not just a commodity: they are a political lever. We are seeing it with Russian gas, boycotted by Europe, with the coup of the USA resuming supplies. Total chaos.
Today the game is even more complex. The United States put an end to their dependence thanks to the shale oil revolution, the oil obtained from stones through the fracking technique, but not to their greed and their business. The alliance between Saudi Arabia and Russia in OPEC plus regulates the taps of global production. China observes everything with pragmatism, securing supplies from every continent.
Yet the paradox is evident. The world talks about ecological transition, renewable energy, electric cars. But in the meantime it continues to live on oil and the repercussions are immediate in a world even more globalized than the 1970s. Transport, the chemical industry, global logistics: everything still depends on crude oil. This is why the word “oil” hits the front pages every day. It’s not just economics. It’s politics, it’s strategy, it’s war and peace. Europe made its own the lesson of 1973 with the Yom Kippur war, which had seen Sundays on foot, the alternating license plates, the increase in bills, stagflation, the industrial crisis. It was precisely then that we started talking about alternative energies and clean nuclear power. But the road to energy independence is still long, too long.
