Book Review: A Century of War

After writing about Venezuela, I realized I didn't understand the petrodollar system. How did it actually work? Why did it matter so much? I picked up A Century of War by William Engdahl and broke my own rule: I didn't take notes. The book reads like top-tier fiction, and I was too absorbed to pause.

The book delivers exactly what I was looking for: a detailed story of how we arrived at a world where most barrels of oil are priced in US dollars. It also gave me deeper appreciation of the connection between finance and politics. The actual mechanisms of how political events shaped financial architecture, and how financial interests drove political outcomes.

Bretton Woods. The Nixon Shock. Oil crises. You've read about these events in countless macro analyses as discrete episodes. Engdahl shows the threads between them - the negotiations happening behind closed doors, the competing interests, the long-term strategies playing out across decades.

When you study markets, you build a spatial mental model: how equities interact with bonds, how commodities relate to currencies. This book adds the longitudinal dimension. You see how decisions in one era create the crises of the next - how the solutions themselves become future problems.

Understanding how the petrodollar system was built helps you recognize when it's breaking. Countries are pricing oil in yuan and euros. BRICS nations are building alternative payment systems. The US just bombed Venezuela. This book explains what's actually at stake in these moves.