Antonio Navalón
In 1911, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill – who then served as First Lord of the Admiralty – decided to change from coal to oil as fuel for the imperial naval fleet. And from that moment on, the whole world was configured with a structure that today, even in the year 2023 and more than a hundred years after that event, is still the direct legacy of how the implementation of that decision was understood. From that decision, the most important characteristics and bases of development of the 20th century began to take shape and, as far as we can see, of the 21st century.
Arthur Balfour was also First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915 and Foreign Secretary from 1916 to 1919, just at the height and end of the First World War. This English politician was the great architect of the consolidation of the world as we knew it, from the 20th century and as it is reconfigured again in the 21st century. At that time, Balfour knew that England would not be able to maintain its navy or power if it did not control the territories where the oil lay. Hence, he devoted himself to studying the Arabian Peninsula; the Dardanelles Passage; the Strait of Hormuz, and which new countries, especially after the First World War, England had to create or control in order to maintain the dominance of oil, regardless of external factors. As a result, Saudi Arabia was born, and the House of Saud found in the British an ally in the fight against the Ottoman Empire.
As a consequence of the above and to exploit the deposits discovered in the area, the first railways were built in the Persian Gulf, as well as the establishment of the regions in which the oil would be exploited and obtained from the then Persia, today Iran, and heirs of the resource. The outline made at the time by Balfour was so important that today, more than a hundred years later, it is still standing.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration promulgated by the British government signified the formal support of the British to give a national home to the Jewish people in Palestine. But in fact, it happened only after the energy distribution map of the Middle East had been drawn up, specifically in 1947, when the UN decided to pass Resolution 181 – also known as the Partition Plan for Palestine – which divided the territory into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. By now, we all know that without Adolf Hitler’s “help” and without the “sacrifice” of 5 to 6 million Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust, the people of Israel would still be yearning to return to their Promised Land. However, the structuring that the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula underwent was of such magnitude that it was then accompanied by the re-implantation of tribes, merchants, and slaves and goat traders who found themselves – as once happened to the House of Saud with the throne of Saudi Arabia – in complete disarray.
According to experts, oil has been the element that has contributed the most to the mobilization and transportation of human beings. Ever since coal was discontinued as the primary energy resource, oil has accompanied people in every discovery or improvement of their means of transportation and technology. Although, as it is written in human nature, we later tend to demonize what we first praise, so too came the exhaustive criticism of fossil fuels. However, today, after blaming fossil fuels for the destruction of the climate, after having lived with the pollution caused by the massive consumption of fossil fuels in the hands of the major countries – i.e., the United States, European countries and, to a certain extent, Russia – there is still an issue to be resolved. In the last forty years, two countries have stood out as having joined fossil-based energy production. These two countries account for twenty-five percent of the world’s total population. To know what we would have been without oil – for better or worse – is impossible to answer.
Today, China and India are the largest consumers of polluting fossil fuels on the planet. These are two nations to which the West has already reiterated on several occasions that they have no right to use this type of resources to develop, seeming to forget that it was these same Western countries that are the main cause of the disaster caused by the overexploitation and overuse of these fossil fuels.
Fossil energies have gone from being what had to be eliminated and being the great executioners of the world in which we live to be the great element of possession of economic and even political independence. And despite this, we are fervently focused on setting goals to make all production through renewable or low-pollution energies. We even put ourselves deadlines to achieve them. The world – or much of it – planned to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and their pollutants from its memories by 2030. However, February 24, 2021, arrived, and everything changed.
Those of us who have been in this world for a long time dreamed at some point of the disappearance or, at least, the compartmentalization of the use of solids as the element that would allow us to continue moving forward. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was difficult to know how long fossil fuels had left or what we had to do in order not to die due to the environmental vendetta or the change in the structure of the weather and the evolution of planet Earth. Green hydrogen is still an unknown variable today, although it seems to be an unknown placed within renewable energies, with only one small problem. That problem is that it is impossible to predict when and how the wind will move, just as it is impossible to determine the exact time at which the natural burning of the Sun can produce energy. In any case, in the face of this unpredictability and at the same time that renewable elements of energy are being financed and created, a “copycat” is being maintained and almost created in traditional energy terms – that is, with gas, oil or coal – of the same thing that renewable energy produces.
The energy map drawn by Balfour was the creation of the modern world. In the year 2023, the new Balfour map is the one that allows us to follow the areas of influence of the new world. At this point, we must say goodbye to the dream of being able to do without oil, coal, or gas in the foreseeable future.
Although millions of Tesla, hybrid, or electric cars are on the streets – which during the day do not consume significant amounts of solid energy – at night, when it is time to recharge them, the batteries consume more than any other automobile. Many wars and many situations have revolved around the dominance of black gold. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we can say that fossil fuels have at least the rest of this century left to live. We do not know if the few ecological reserves left on planet Earth will be destroyed at this time, and, worst of all, unfortunately, there is no viable alternative or possible review of the creation of an orderly evolution of the use of energies.
Therefore, the world’s new reality must include the elements that condition – in terms of power – the use of energy and reserves by governments. And just as in 1911, the English empire was the largest empire on Earth, and the sterling pound was the equivalent of the dollar at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the birth of American global hegemony were about to arrive. It took a world war and the destruction of a large part of the planet for the British empire to disappear gradually and for the American empire and its dollar to position itself as the world’s political and economic leader.
Right now, it is impossible to think of a situation of economic blocs without having, on the one hand, the dollar, which is still the most used currency for any commercial transaction up to now, although we do not know for how much longer. However, despite having been part of the International Monetary System for a long time, the yuan has already positioned itself as one of the emerging currencies with the most splendid future in the financial world. This fact may produce an enormous contradiction since it is in the best interest of China to see the dollar strengthen in the short term since it is the country with the largest dollar reserves in the world unless the Chinese have already decided to make a Copernican change in the economic and monetary values that have governed our world up to now.
The conclusion is clear. We need a new world layout that is impossible without considering China’s relevance. The United States is still the country on Earth with the most significant military installations – more than 800 – and has an undeniable capacity to destroy the planet; however, the big question is whether it still has the ability to continue building it or how we find a balance of power between China, the United States and the formation of a new landscape in which – according to my understanding – the coming years will be decided and which have to include the actual weight of the most inhabited country on Earth, i.e., India.
India does not have the Chinese yuan or the dollar; it simply has its rupee. What it does have, however, is a form of government where ethnic wars and abuses against each other are part of the political landscape on offer. The way the structure of the auxiliary technology industry has developed, and the ways in which the situation of the minorities that populate the territory – especially Muslims and Indians – are defined suggest that the situation is uncertain. While China, a country governed by the Communist Party, does not feel obliged to share the menu of Western countries, India does not even feel obliged to contemplate a social discipline such as that of China.
With this complex panorama personified by players who are acquiring more and more qualities and rights to sit at the table of the big players and where the rules of the game are determined in economic, political, and social aspects, it is obvious to question and try to decipher what is in the interest of each party. Some countries, such as Mexico, are part of the dollar universe and, although for political or social reasons, could play and flirt with the BRICS, it is clear to me that there really are not many options. Despite their growth, neither the yuan nor the Indian rupee nor the Russian ruble are yet capable of changing the game’s rules. Much less to change the minds and convince the identities and interests of a country as key to the CUSMA/USMCA/T-MEC as Mexico.
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