“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.” These words are attributed to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and have become the unofficial blueprint for American hegemony. Although Washington lectures on democracy, human rights, and stability, a cold-eyed view of a century of foreign policy shows a much more one-tracked approach. The manoeuvre of Uncle Sam is to play the world as a chessboard, in which the dearest piece is not a king or a queen but a barrel of crude.

The United States’ obsession with oil is not just about fuelling cars or heating homes; it is the very core of the ‘petrodollar’ system. Since the 1970s, the global trade of oil has been conducted almost exclusively in U.S. dollars. This compels all nations to accumulate huge stockpiles of greenbacks, which subsidises American living standards and allows the U.S. to run massive deficits without the normal economic consequences. Losing control over global oil would mean losing the mechanism of U.S. financial control.

Pakistan’s Delivery........

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