HANS MORGENTHAU
515
accommodation and compromise in foreign policy as "appeasement,"
relying instead upon the uncompromising containment of the enemy .
Lacking credible moral standards that could guide his action, the acror
is reduced to either denying the moral issue altogether or univer–
salizing it to the point of irrelevance.
On the material plane the West has been made vulnerable to oil as
a political weapon by its high technological development. The power
which oil besrows upon oil-producing nations is the result of the tech–
nological development of modern industrial nations. Twenty or fifty
years ago, oil did not bestow such power upon oil-producing nations
because the use of oil as the lifeblood of modern industry was limited.
The oil-consuming nations still operated in a buyer's market. If one
source ofoil was not available or was available only on conditions which
were unacceptable
to
the consuming nation, that nation could go
elsewhere and buy it there on more convenient terms. The contem–
porary situation is characterized by an imbalance between supply
and demand
to
such an extent that the buyer's market has been
transformed into aseller'smarket and nations which have large deposits
of oil, cooperating as the oil-producing nations did during the fall
of 1973, can apply a stranglehold to the consuming nations; or they
can impose political conditions which the consuming nations can
refuse to meet only at the risk of enormous political, economic, and
social dislocations .
Thus, the vulnerability of highly developed industrial nations of
the West to the supply of oil is a function of their industrial
advancement. The shift of power from the oil-consuming
to
the
oil-producing nations is a by-product of the former's industrial power.
Industrial development has widened the gap between the advanced
and backward nations in favor of the former, but it has supplied some
of the latter with a new weapon: a quasi-monopoly of oil.
That weapon can be deadly, but it resembles nuclear power in
that it is purely destructive . An oil-producing nation can bring an
oil-consuming one
to
its knees, but it cannot govern it by virtue of its
oil monopoly. Thus the potency of the oil weapon demonstrates
dramatically the decline of Western power. Yet it indicates no
substitute for that declining power-except the power of destruction.
The moral and material decline of the West is an observable fact.
What is not observable is the kind of order that could take the place of
