Oil as a foreign policy instrument

Every barrel of oil that crosses a border carries leverage with it. The country that supplies it has quiet power over the country that depends on it — the power to disrupt, to price, to withhold. That leverage is rarely exercised openly. It doesn't need to be. The dependency itself shapes policy. This page maps those dependencies and shows how the fastest restructuring of global oil trade in 50 years — triggered by the 2022 sanctions on Russia — redistributed leverage across the entire global energy system.