The trend toward authorial self-glorification has gone too far when the back cover of a book reads: 'Daniel Yergin is an authority on world affairs'. What's next? An Expert on Matters Pertaining to the Universe?
Considering his exalted position in the world, this is a remarkably mediocre book, though there are details worth pondering, such as the irony of Japan powering its Pearl Harbor raid with oil imported from California. Worse than that, and more sobering, is the realization that Japan subjugated Taiwan, China, and other parts of Asia over the course of four decades with oil from California. Millions of lives were destroyed, but the oil spigot was not shut off until July of 1941. Why? Roosevelt did not want to give Japan a pretext for attacking the East Indies. Yergin relates this astounding spinelessness without a hint of irony, as though it were a perfectly good excuse for supplying a fascist power with the means to mass murder.
Yergin misses the boat entirely when it comes to the price drop of the mid-eighties, claiming the Saudis flooded the market to gain market share and that George Bush went from place to place as the 'point man' for the Reagan administration arguing for a price floor for oil. Nonsense. Ronald Reagan's goal was the destruction of the Soviet Empire, and one of his key strategies was to take away the Russians' source of hard currency: the sale of oil. Every one dollar drop in the price of crude deprived the Soviets of billions of dollars of revenue, revenue that their own paraplegic of an economy could never hope to generate on its own. If there was any 'point man' for the administration in the Middle East, it was William Casey, who guaranteed the Saudis' security against Marxist revolutionaries and regional dictators like Saddam. In exchange, the Saudis flooded the market with oil. This not only deprived the Soviets of real money, it also gave Americans the equivalent of a tax cut. Is it just coincidence that the Soviet Union began to collapse just a few months later? Just coincidence that the US saved the Saudis and Kuwait from the fourth largest army in the world, when just a few years earlier these same Arab sheikhs were universally reviled for having us over a barrel?
Also lacking in this very thick book is any serious technical discussion of oil, theories of exploration, pros and cons of new technologies...In place of this, there is seemingly endless talk of contracts, and, even more mind-numbing, negotiation of contracts, interlarded with impertinent anecdotes about people who wandered in and out of the industry. Yergin devotes a lot of space to rehashing trivia about Rockefeller and cliches about Americans and their love of cars, material that has been presented elsewhere so many times as to be almost common knowledge. In a book that is ostensibly about oil and money and power, almost nothing is said about the governments of Europe and their hyper-taxation of oil or what their goals are and whether they've been attained. One looks in vain for any mention of the natural gas or propane or diesel or asphalt or plastic industries.
Overall, The Prize resembles a mass of articles from Newsweek and Time: flaccid, insipid, superficial, slick. This would not surprise me if it were the work of anyone other than 'an authority on world affairs'.
