Daniel Yergin: belief

Transcript context

…Why didn't the US government—or the UK government or so on—do more to be like, "OK, you guys are companies. You guys can't negotiate that hard. But we really care about making sure that America has a lot of oil. I think the government did back them up. Remember the British owned a big share of British Petroleum, now BP, until the late 1980s. The British government was in there, but then you had the nationalization of what was then called Anglo-Persian, Anglo-Iranian oil, which became BP. I think it was inevitable. The governments did try and support, but there were limits to what they could do. The question of access and of maintaining the supplies, then and now, remains crucial. You have the US Navy today trying to push back on the Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking oil tankers. Thinking purely from the perspective of the companies, if you were in charge of one of the majors, would you have refused to train domestic workers in the expedition?…

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