A Global Fight for Control of Petroleum Begins
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industry could not compete with Germany’s emerging Daimler motors, then she would control the raw material on which the Daimler motors must run. Just what this policy of British petroleum control implied for the course of world history will become clear. SIR EDWARD GREY’S FATEFUL PARIS TRIP Why would Britain risk a world war in order to stop the development of Germany’s industrial economy in 1914? The ultimate reason she declared war in August 1914 lay fundamentally ‘in the old tradition of British policy, through which England grew to great power status, and through which she sought to remain a great power,’ stated German banker Karl Helfferich in 1918. ‘England’s policy was always constructed against the politically and economically strongest Continental power,’ he stressed. Ever since Germany became the politically and economically strongest Continental power, did England feel threatened from Germany more than from any other land in its global economic position and its naval supremacy. Since that point, the English– German differences were unbridgeable, and susceptible to no agreement in any one single question. Helfferich sadly notes the accuracy of the declaration of Bismarck from 1897: ‘The only condition which could lead to improvement of German–English relations would be if we bridled our economic development, and this is not possible.’8 In April 1914, King George VII and his foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, made an extraordinary visit to meet French President Poincaré in Paris. It was one of the few times Sir Edward Grey left the British Isles. Russia’s ambassador to France, Iswolski, joined them and the three powers firmed up a secret military alliance against the German and Austro-Hungarian powers. Grey deliberately did not warn Germany beforehand of its secret alliance, whereby Britain would enter a war which engaged any one of the carefully constructed web of alliance partners she had built up against Germany.9 Many in the British establishment had determined well before 1914 that war was the only course suitable to bring the European situation under control. British interests dictated, according to her balance-of-power logic, a shift from the traditional ‘pro-Ottoman and anti-Russian’ alliance strategy of the nineteenth century, to a ‘pro-
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