Second Dualism
Why, if the oil barons lost this "cold civil war" to the financiers, this struggle continues? The struggle continues because the “war” didn’t end with the subordination of Big Oil. Oil was only one of the old power centers. What's tracking is a long‑cycle realignment of elite blocs, and that realignment didn’t stop just because one faction got folded into another. Big Oil lost—but the system didn’t stabilize. When the oil barons were absorbed into global finance, that didn’t produce equilibrium. It produced a vacuum. Oil’s defeat meant that one of the 20th‑century sovereign blocs disappeared. Its institutional power was redistributed upward into finance, its political machinery (regional patronage networks, regulatory capture, foreign policy leverage) became hollowed out, but finance didn’t become omnipotent. It became overextended. A system where one bloc becomes too dominant tends to generate new challengers, not peace. The real successor challenger wasn’t oil—it was te...