When people posit that foreign policy actions are "for oil", I have heard it answered from various spots on the political spectrum that this is not the case because oil is fungible, meaning, broadly, subect to the dictates of the market. It doesn't matter who specifically has it b/c it ends up on the market anyways and available to anyone. I heard anti-Iraq war NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman say this at a talk at the JFK Library. Another anti-Iraq war columnist, James Carroll, of the Boston Globe uses the same argument in his book House of War to point out the relative unimportance of Saddam Hussein's control of oil since it was subject to the dictates of the market. Yet I don't see how this fungible argument can hold. It strains credulity to me to maintain that as long as oil is making it to market smoothly its actual origin is immaterial, beyond perhaps who's directly turning a profit from its sale (but then again this will be subject to the dictates of the market as well, right?). There seems to be an awful lot of jockeying among nations for access to oil if it is just going to go onto the market regardless. Can it be that national leaders simply don't understand this fungible concept or is there something more going on that renders the fungible assessment soon-to-be-if-not-already outdated?
I wonder if there's not some big end game being played out for the time when the oil truly starts to run out. Perhaps at that point it will no longer be a matter of markets but of nations controlling by force the increasingly limited quantities and distributing it (or not distributing it) in ways that are strategically useful. With an open market you can't very well starve China, say, of oil because it only needs to buy it. But perhaps that structure will not be there for much longer. I wonder if perhaps a big power move will happen and then the market force question of fungibility, however much it ever did explain the politics around oil, will be obsolete.
