The Strategic Impact of World Economic Changes

Abstract

Any review of the strategic impact of world economic changes in the past three decades could still usefully start from the opening observation of Strategic Survey 1973: ‘The successful use of the oil weapon by the Arab states … produced the greatest shock, the most potent sense of a new era, of any event of recent years’. The year of the oil crisis, 1973 — conveniently located exactly halfway through the thirty years of HSS history — did indeed mark a watershed in post-war international relations: it threw into stark relief major structural changes in international economic relations and dramatically highlighted their implications for international relations as a whole — including the key issues of security.