Oil and the Navy

I highly recommend a recent article by Liam Denning in Bloomberg, “Oil’s New World Disorder.” The US’s decreasing dependence on oil imports, and China and India’s increasing dependence on oil, coincide with the possible changing roles of those countries’ navies in policing oil shipping routes from the Middle East. The US currently has 50% of the world’s combined naval fleet. Should the US continue to be the policeman of the seas?

Naval power and oil have been inextricably intertwined since before World War II. Their relationship is part of the story of oil told in Daniel Yergin‘s two epic histories of the oil industry, The Quest and The Prize, both of which I highly recommend.