“Follow the money” is the advice routinely offered to detectives in low-budget thrillers. For anyone attempting to understand the ebbs and flows of international politics, I offer a variant of that old line: “Follow the oil”.
Any suggestion that the search for energy is fundamental to the foreign policy of Britain and the US is often treated as faintly indecent. In Britain, the government is currently angrily brushing off suggestions that the decision to release Adbelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, had anything to do with Libya’s oil and gas. Jack Straw, the UK justice secretary, has released letters in which he spoke of considering prisoner transfers to Libya, in the context of “wider negotiations” and the “overwhelming interests” of the UK. He did not use the word “oil”; but, under mounting pressure, he has since admitted that trade and oil interests were “a very big part” of Britain’s desire to bring Libya “back into the fold”.
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