The First Law of Petropolitics

Iran's president denies the Holocaust, Hugo Chávez tells Western leaders to go to hell, and Vladimir Putin is cracking the whip. Why? They know that the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions. It's the First Law of Petropolitics, and it may be the axiom to explain our age.

BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN | APRIL 25, 2006

When I heard the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declare that the Holocaust was a "myth," I couldn't help asking myself: "I wonder if the president of Iran would be talking this way if the price of oil were $20 a barrel today rather than $60 a barrel." When I heard Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez telling...

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Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times and author of, most recently, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005).

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 SUBJECTS: OIL, POLITICS, DEMOCRACY