Oil and Policy

"The security of the U.S. is dependent upon adequate supplies of petroleum."

This sentence, a well-worn cliche to economists and oilmen, is still news to millions of Americans who think first of their thousands of airplanes, their Army and Navy, their two great oceans, their enormous productive capacity. Harry Truman, Senator from Missouri, used the words as the basic premise of a report made by his investigating committee this week, in an attempt to get all Americans to realize that, without oil, the U.S. would be militarily and diplomatically helpless.

Oil had only begun to make the U.S. front pages--and every trickling drop of news had been squeezed out of U.S. and British diplomats despite the deepest kind of over-my-dead-body reluctance.

Oil and Peace. As yet, all the world had to go on was the U.S. Government's intention to build a 1,000-mile, $130-165 million pipeline across Saudi Arabia, to move oil from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean (TIME, Feb. 14). But this was only an item; beyond it, momentous things were at stake--even the future peace of the world.

The United Nations will sit at the peace table in control of over 95% of the world's oil. An agreement among them on oil alone would in effect amount to a realist's League of Nations more powerful than any World Court yet dreamed of--and more instantly effective. For no nation can yet make war without oil; and if all but a dribble of the world's oil were on the peace table, under agreement to be sold only to non-aggressor nations, then postwar cooperation might be put on the simplest and most realistic bases.

Oil and Sheiks. The U.S. pipeline in Saudi Arabia is only the first step toward collective security. To plan further steps, it was learned last week, the U.S. and Great Britain are to begin diplomatic conversations soon, in this country. These will attempt to iron out the problems arising from: 1) years of British diplomatic control of the Middle East, where the U.S. as a government (not as an oil producer) is a newcomer; 2) the inordinately "fluid" political situation there, where Kings, Sheiks, Moslems and Zionists are involved.

Next, it was hinted, the U.S. will meet with the Russians, who are also neighbors of the Middle East. But it was premature even to guess the agenda for that session.

The Long View. The importance of the Middle East oil lies in the fact that it is the world's one great oil reservoir outside the Western Hemisphere. No two--out of hundreds--of estimates agree on how much oil is left in this Hemisphere. The minimum is Harold Ickes' terse "The U.S. cannot oil another war."

The State Department, Harold Ickes and other U.S. policy makers are therefore taking the longest possible view of the future. Like Thomas Jefferson, buying the West in the Louisiana Purchase, and Secretary William H. Seward, buying the-North in Alaska, the U.S. was now looking much further beyond the foreseeable future, in an effort to guarantee U.S. security.

Diplomatically, the lid was on. But Acting Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. indicated that a "comprehensive announcement" of U.S. plans and policy was being readied.

In London, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, questioned by Parliament about the U.S. entry into Britain's Middle Eastern bailiwick, would say no more than that consultation was necessary. British press comment on the U.S.-Arabian pipeline was notably nonexistent. And the U.S. press would have said much more if it could have found out anything.

The Near View. They may find out more soon. A special Senate committee, co-chairmaned by an oil-millionaire Senator, Edward H. Moore of Oklahoma, is scheduled to tear into the whole question of U.S. foreign policy on oil.

Senator Moore, a rugged individualist who regards the "Ickes Pipeline" as a New Deal plot against U.S. oil producers, can be counted on to bring out all possible anti-pipeline testimony. Its probable gist: 1) the cry that U.S. and Caribbean oil reserves are dwindling is old stuff and has never come true; 2) the colossal war consumption of the United Nations has no relation to the amount of oil that the world can consume in peacetime; 3) U.S. meddling in increased Middle Eastern production will merely destroy the Western Hemisphere's markets--particularly those of Good Neighbors long cultivated by high U.S. policy--without assuring excess oil in wartime.

And the release of the Senate's Truman Committee report, a measured, figure-crammed study of "Petroleum Matters," will this week pour oil on the blaze from a new quarter. For it recommends that in this matter "basic policy determinations must be made by the Congress."

In coming weeks, it is probable that the average U.S. citizen will hear a great deal more about 1) oil and 2) foreign policy than he has in years.

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