British Foreign Policy in the Caribbean Basin 1938–1945: Oil, Nationalism and Relations with the United States
The formulation of foreign policy is at best an inchoate process. The very term implies an orthodoxy of identification, pursuit and maintenance of perceived interests which is often patently lacking in reality. When a nation is beset by a declining capacity to exert influence in a particular region as a result both of competition from other powers and of incipient assertiveness on the part of local interests, the foreign-policy process may be reduced to one of administering ad hoc responses to particular developments which appear to lack any overall rationale. The Caribbean Basin comprised two areas in which British interests were conceptually different: the British West Indies, where those interests were primarily strategic, and northern Latin America, where they were essentially economic. Nevertheless, the components of a tripartite relationship involving an ascendant United States, the rise of local nationalism, and declining British influence were phenomena omnipresent in the region and thus for the purpose of studying British foreign policy, the Caribbean Basin may usefully be considered as one entity. This relationship focused largely upon the single most important strategic commodity of the war years, and Venezuela's own principal source of wealth oil. If, as Lord Curzon claimed, the Allied Powers in the Great War 'floated to victory on a wave of oil', the same was even more true of the 1939-45 conflict. Britain received 40 % of her total oil imports from Venezuela in I940 and 75 % by I942.1 Venezuela was long established as the world's leading oil exporter (30 % of the total by I939), and the commodity accounted for some 5 o % of the Government's revenue