No longer would the competition for new oil lands be primarily restricted to a battle among risk-taking entrepreneurs and aggressive businessmen. The Great War had made abundantly clear that petroleum had become an essential element in the strategy of nations; and the politicians and bureaucrats, though they had hardly been absent before, would now rush headlong into the center of the struggle, drawn into the competition by a common perception—that the postwar world would require ever-greater quantities of oil for economic prosperity and national power.
