When the US and UK went to war in Iraq in 2003, the stated justifications were weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda. The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles of WMDs beyond around 500 degraded and abandoned chemical munitions left over from the 1980s, which it deemed not militarily significant. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found no substantial evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. President Bush later acknowledged that much of the intelligence had turned out to be wrong. Over 4,400 American service personnel and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died. Iraq sits on the world's fifth largest oil reserves.
That is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented congressional record.
The relationship between the United States and oil is not new and not subtle. In August 1944, while the Second World War was still being fought, the Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement was signed, dividing Middle Eastern oil between the United States and Britain. In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised Iranian oil. The replacement was the Shah. In 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, the United States provided Iraq with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces in violation of international law. Henry Kissinger's private view of the Iran-Iraq War was reported to be that it was a pity both sides could not lose. The war lasted eight years. Hundreds of thousands died. The Persian Gulf's oil kept flowing.
The Gulf War of 1991 was triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The United States mobilised more than 500,000 troops to restore the Kuwaiti royal family to power. Kuwait's oil reserves are the sixth largest in the world. Saudi Arabia's, next door, are the second largest. The concern driving American intervention was explicit: Saddam in control of both Kuwaiti and Saudi oil would have given a single hostile actor leverage over a significant proportion of global supply. That is not a cynical reading. It is what American policymakers said at the time.
Since MotorBuzz reported on how the Iran war sent Brent crude surging 13 per cent to $82.37 in a single session, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut and 200 vessels anchored and waiting, the connection between military action in oil-producing regions and what ordinary people pay for everything has never been more visible. Oil is not just fuel. It is the feedstock for plastics, fertilisers, pharmaceuticals and synthetic textiles. When oil price spikes, grocery prices follow within months. The profiteers are not always who you think they are: commodity traders, futures markets and refining companies all benefit from volatility regardless of which direction it runs.
The more recent pattern has not changed. In January 2026, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and began transferring control of Venezuelan oil reserves and production to the United States and US companies. Venezuela holds the world's largest proven oil reserves. The stated justification was narcoterrorism. The practical outcome was that a sovereign nation's primary economic asset passed into American hands. Observers described it as a return of gunboat diplomacy under what some have called the Donroe Doctrine, a modern iteration of the Monroe Doctrine first formulated in 1823.
Since 1890, the United States has conducted more than 200 documented military interventions in foreign countries, according to records compiled by Veterans for Peace from congressional research service data. The list includes Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1958, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua through the 1980s, Iraq in 1991, the Balkans in the 1990s, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq again in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria through the 2010s, and Venezuela in 2026. Not all were about oil. Some were about ideology, some about regional power, some about domestic politics. But the Middle East and Venezuela, where the stakes have most consistently escalated to full military force, are where the oil is.
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So what happens if oil stops mattering?
The International Energy Agency projects that EVs will displace more than five million barrels of oil per day globally by 2030. That figure comes entirely from transportation. It does not include the broader industrial and heating shifts that accompany an energy transition. The trajectory, if it continues, points toward a world where oil's role as the irreplaceable driver of modern economies gradually diminishes. The question that follows is what happens to the countries that produce it, and whether the geopolitical architecture built around controlling it also dissolves.
The honest answer is: not quickly, and not simply.
Saudi Arabia, which holds the second largest oil reserves in the world and runs its economy on petroleum revenues, has been planning for this for years. Vision 2030, the kingdom's national diversification strategy, involves massive investment in tourism, technology, renewable energy and manufacturing. The Public Investment Fund owns a 61 per cent stake in the US electric car maker Lucid. Saudi Arabia has launched its own EV brand, Ceer, in partnership with Taiwan's Foxconn. It is building solar farms, smart cities and EV manufacturing plants. More than 40 per cent of Saudi consumers told PwC they are considering an EV purchase in the next three years. Petrol costs approximately 27 pence per litre there, heavily subsidised. The country that produces the oil cannot afford to let its own people pay market rates for it.
That is the paradox at the centre of the petro-state model. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia and Venezuela have built social contracts on the proceeds of oil: subsidised fuel, cheap housing, government employment, managed dissent. A rapid global shift away from oil does not just threaten export revenues. It threatens the political settlements that keep those governments functional. Russia, which funds its military operations substantially through oil and gas revenue, is already under pressure from Western sanctions on energy exports. Venezuela's economic collapse pre-dates the Trump administration's 2026 intervention but accelerated dramatically when oil prices fell in 2014 and never fully recovered.
The optimistic version of an electrified world is one where the strategic imperative to control oil-producing regions evaporates alongside demand. If the Strait of Hormuz carries a fraction of what it does today, closing it becomes a less decisive act of economic warfare. If Riyadh and Moscow and Caracas no longer hold leverage over the energy security of consuming nations, the leverage disappears with it. The wars that were fought to maintain that leverage become harder to justify and easier to end.
The pessimistic version is that power seeks a new resource to concentrate around. The lithium for EV batteries sits primarily in Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, a region the United States has a documented history of intervening in. Cobalt comes overwhelmingly from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese mining companies have established deep commercial roots that American and European strategists are already watching closely. Rare earth elements are dominated by China, which has demonstrated willingness to use export restrictions as geopolitical leverage. The geography changes. The logic may not.
Professor Emily Meierding of the Naval Postgraduate School, who has studied oil wars in depth, argues that oil wars are largely a myth in their pure form — that even in conflicts most commonly attributed to oil, control of additional oil resources was rarely the primary cause of aggression. What oil does more reliably, the research suggests, is make states capable of sustained military aggression, fund the weapons, pay the soldiers, and absorb the economic cost of prolonged conflict. A resource-poor state has fewer options. A resource-rich one has more runway to start and sustain a war even when it becomes costly.
By that logic, depleting the oil revenues of states that have historically used those revenues to fund military adventurism is not nothing. It is not peace. But it removes one of the mechanisms by which war becomes economically sustainable.
Would wars end if we all went electric? No. Humans will find something else to fight over. They always have. But the specific wars that have been fought in the last century to ensure the uninterrupted flow of oil through chokepoints, to topple governments that threatened to nationalise production, to protect the petrodollar's role as the world's reserve currency settlement mechanism — those wars become harder to justify when the commodity that drove them no longer drives the global economy.
The Iranian war did not start because of oil alone. But when Brent crude surged 13 per cent the morning after the first strikes, the market told you everything you needed to know about what the world still believes is at stake. Until that reflex is gone, the calculus has not changed.
Sources: US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on pre-war Iraq intelligence | Iraq Survey Group final report | Veterans for Peace, Century of US Military Interventions | IEA Global EV Outlook 2024 | Wikipedia / Foreign interventions by the United States | Wikipedia / United States foreign policy in the Middle East | Mershon Center, Ohio State / Colonial Legacies and US Military Intervention in Oil-Producing States | Emily Meierding, "The Myth of the Oil War" | Georgetown Environmental Law Review / Energy Transition in the Middle East | PwC Saudi consumer EV survey 2024 | Arab News / IEA five million barrels displacement projection | MotorBuzz: Iran War Sends Fuel Prices Soaring
