“Peace is for the women and the weak. Empires are forged in war.”

It is what Agamemnon said to his brother Menelaus, who wanted his wife back after Paris had carried her off to Troy, and it was the last honest sentence anyone spoke on the subject. A thousand ships set sail, officially for Helen. The poets sang of the most beautiful face on earth, the heralds spoke of honor, and the widows were told their husbands had died for love. Historians, a less romantic sort, have their doubts. Troy did not guard a woman. It guarded the mouth of a strait, the Hellespont, and whoever sat on that shore charged the rest of the world for the right to cross. The Greeks did not cross the sea for a face. They crossed it for a tollbooth. Helen was the caption history wrote beneath the invoice, and the version read aloud to those who buried the dead.

Three thousand years later, the trick has not aged a day. There is always a Helen on hand, a face lovely enough or endangered enough to make greed look like romance, or like survival. It is worth asking what is really wanted at the far end of the water. Not a woman, and not a nation, but a currency, and behind it the nearest thing to sorcery that mortal ingenuity has ever devised, the power to make money out of nothing, forever.

There was a time when money kept a certain modesty. In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the nations agreed that thirty-five dollars would always buy an ounce of gold, and that every other currency would ride at anchor beside the dollar. Each bill was a promise redeemable in metal, and the promise held the printer’s hand. It worked as long as the metal lasted. Then came Vietnam and the appetites of prosperity at home, the presses ran off more dollars than Fort Knox could ever honor, and France, minding its own accounts, began trading paper for bars and emptying the vault. On a Sunday evening in August of 1971, Nixon went on television and announced the end of convertibility with the air of a man rescheduling the trains. From that night on, the dollar rested on two supports only, faith and the fleet.

Faith needs something to lean on, and here came the shrewdest stroke of the last century. Washington and Riyadh reached a shrewd understanding: the world’s oil would........

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