On June 19, Foreign Policy published an excerpt of Emma Ashford’s new book, Oil, the State and War, entitled “The Problem with Being a Petrostate.”
In the excerpt, Ashford discusses the phenomena of oil-wealthy states being more likely than other countries to start wars. Then, Ashford rebuts the idea of the oil weapon, concluding “it is thus surprisingly, perhaps even counterintuitively, hard for a petrostate to directly exercise its oil power even when it exports a sizable chunk of the world market.”
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