But England and France in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Ottoman lands between them, frustrating the German empire’s building designs. Resource poor Germany courted the Ottoman Empire’s resource, finding black gold in Basra while surveying a highway to connect to Bonn. The German Reich’s industrial power produced quality steel but Westminster settled for wealth in financial books. England’s admiralty gave up coal for oil to become the world’s most powerful Navy in 1912. Oil and the combustion engine in war proved to be a volatile combination. The geopolitics of oil in the last century makes it very clear that the black fluid on the ground is more than just a smudge on the garage floor as it has been the raison d’etre of imperial nation-states. 7’s Day of Infamy 70 years ago that lifted U.S.’ emotions to militant heights, a masterful instance of great literary coinage, has historians judging the attack on Pearl Harbor to be not surprising nor unmitigated. Happily, historiography in time allows analytical consensus and a broad ownership of communal wisdom.
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