Chapter 42 The Marriage of Oil and the Dollar

Anglo-American oil interests first appeared in World War II and became increasingly influential.In the final agreement on the arrangement of the post-war economic and financial "New World Order" forged by the British and American negotiators who participated in the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire in 1944, the hegemony of the British and American oil industries in the world led them to reach an agreement. It was Sir Keynes, the British Secretary of the Exchequer, and Harry Dexter, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. The Bretton Woods system was built on "three pillars": in the event of a balance-of-payments crisis, donations from member countries of the International Monetary Fund are emergency reserves that can be used; the World Bank grants large amounts of public project loans to member governments; GATT was used to create a controlled "free trade".

However, in order to ensure the hegemony of Britain and the United States in world currency and trade affairs after the war, Keynes and his American colleagues also designed some extremely technical provisions.First, the actual voting rights in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are controlled by the United States and the United Kingdom; second, the Bretton Woods system established the so-called gold standard exchange system.Under this system, each member country's currency must be pegged to the US dollar.In turn, the dollar-to-gold ratio was set at $35 per ounce, which was set by President Roosevelt in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression and on the eve of World Wars.

During the war, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had gathered the official gold reserves of all countries in the world. The amount was huge, and due to the destruction of the war, the U.S. dollar appeared as a strong currency, supported by the strongest economy in the world, and almost no one stood up to question the war. After the dollar standard. Few complaints about the Bretton Woods monetary order were America's big oil companies, such as Standard Oil's Rockefeller and the Pittsburgh Mellon family's Gulf Oil.They have gained the bulk of the oil exploration rights in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.Due to President Roosevelt's intelligent diplomacy and Churchill's negligence, Saudi Arabia broke away from British control during the war.Saudi King Abdullah Aziz received an unprecedented land lease from President Roosevelt in 1943, a gesture by the United States to ensure Saudi postwar goodwill towards American oil interests .

This move by Roosevelt was suggested by Harold Ickes.At the time, Ikers was the petroleum coordinator for the U.S. Department of Defense. In December 1942, the U.S. State Department stated, “Our firmest belief is that the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil resources should reflect broader national interests.” Fate is officially linked.But it won't be the last time.The implication, State Department strategists recognized, was that U.S. foreign policy, at least in some key areas, should be more like an empire, like Great Britain, with control over strategic interests far from the homeland. A pillar of postwar power.

But few other Americans realized this in the first few years after World War II.They are more eager to recover from depression and war as soon as possible and live a normal life.