A Race to the Truth Part II

Which presidential candidate is best equipped to give America an effective and moral foreign policy and to ensure our economic security?

The truth is, oil, not presidents, control our foreign policy. That has been the case for a very long time. For all the good it has done, oil has perverted our relationship with other nations, tempted us into behaviors not worthy of our ideals, and cost us enormous loss of life and treasure.

After sponsoring a series of expert meetings on the global energy situation two years ago, the Aspen Institute put it this way:

Today, the dependence of the U.S. and its allies on foreign sources of oil and gas continues to limit their freedom of action and puts them in the awkward position of trying to balance the desire for energy security against other foreign policy goals. Western Europe and Ukraine need Russian gas. Italy buys energy from Libya and Algeria. India wants a gas pipeline from Iran. Japan and Korea are heavily dependent on the Middle East. And U.S. friends in Latin America are being pressured by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. China’s growing relationships with Iran, Sudan and Venezuela are examples.

Alliances of convenience between buyers and sellers can evolve into groups that are hostile to international norms and could influence international politics – e.g., U.N. Security Council votes on totally unrelated issues. Many countries that are rich in energy resources are prone to corruption, are autocratic, and repress political dissent in the name of stability. If the U.S. associates with these countries to obtain energy supplies, it risks alienating the oppressed population and undermining its credibility on other foreign policy goals, such as the promotion of democracy and human rights. If it distances itself, the governments make decisions that are costly to U.S. interests.

Iran has used its throw-weight as OPEC’s second-largest oil producer to gain leverage for building a nuclear capability. The CIA reports that with the price of petroleum climbing in recent years, Iran has amassed $70 billion in foreign exchange reserves. Iran not only sits on big oil deposits; it sits along the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategically important waterways on the planet because 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is shipped through it. Sabotage, military action or terrorism could cause a disruption of oil shipments sufficient to trigger a devastating increase in the price of oil.

Well before its invasion of Georgia, Russia demonstrated that it will use its rich oil and gas supplies to try to become a superpower again. Writing in TIME magazine early last year, Harvard History Prof. Niall Ferguson noted that then-Russian President Vladimir Putin felt free to be more critical of U.S. policy and to begin exerting itself internationally because that country sits on one-quarter of the world’s proven natural gas reserves and 6 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

It’s now widely acknowledged that some portion of every dollar we Americans pay at the pump goes to nations that support terrorist organizations. There’s an infuriating irony to the yellow “Support Our Troops” magnets on the back of so many gas-guzzlers in the U.S. today. They would more accurately read, “I Tithe for Bin Laden”. As the Aspen Institute’s 2006 report notes:

Inevitably, some of the petrodollars flowing to governments in the Middle East make their way into the hands of radical Islamist groups such as al Qaeda, leading to the feeling that the U.S. and its allies are ‘paying for both sides’ of the war against these groups. Other oil and gas revenues fund other undesirable actions. As one speaker pithily noted, countries that have energy but believe they need more weapons and countries that have weapons but not enough energy have business to discuss.

After the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States diversified its oil suppliers, but that doesn’t provide much security. As the Energy Futures Coalition notes:

Unfortunately, diversifying the sources of U.S. oil supply does not materially affect the economic risks of dependence. Because oil is a global commodity, freely traded, the price of oil is determined on the world market. It responds to the forces of supply and demand and to political events, no matter where they occur. Even if the U.S. shifted all of its oil imports to relatively safe sources, such as Canada and Mexico, it would not be protected from a price shock - whether caused by politics, war or terrorism. The only way to reduce the risks associated with oil is to reduce the demand for it – in other words, to increase the efficiency of oil consumption and increase the use of alternative fuels.

America’s questionable suppliers of petroleum aren’t confined to the volatile Gulf. Our major suppliers include Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria and Angola. In April 2007, armed rebel gangs blew up oil pipelines, disabled pumping stations and kidnapped foreign oil workers in Nigeria, the source of 1 million barrels of daily crude oil exports to the U.S. at that time. According to Transparency International, a Berlin-based organization that evaluates corruption, Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s hostility to the U.S. is well known. The U.S. State Department warns Americans traveling to Algeria to be alert to recent terrorist attacks against foreigners – including bombings, false roadblocks, kidnappings, ambushes and assassinations that “occur regularly” -- and to “evaluate carefully the risk posed to their personal safety.” The U.S. Embassy in Algeria requires its personnel to live and work “under strict security restrictions”. In the past few years, Angola has been troubled by civil war and an insurgency.

The Emergency Response and Research Institute in Chicago, which monitors these things, cites internet messages to al Qaeda cells to “hit oil interests in all regions which serve the United States, not just in the Middle East.”

“By every measure of petroleum security or vulnerability that we have examined, the United States is as vulnerable, and in most cases more so, than at the time of the 1973 Embargo,” researchers James Williams of WTRG Economics and A.F. Alhajji of Ohio Northern University concluded in 2003, 30 years after an oil crisis that was supposed to be our wake-up call.

The Center for Naval Analysis and the National Intelligence Council both have concluded in the last 18 months that climate change – made worse by the world’s continuing thirst for oil -- presents a threat to national security and will create fertile ground for extremists.

As Sir Crispin Tickell, Great Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations, puts it: “Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can’t move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try to make their point.”

"For years, too many of us have viewed global warming as simply an environmental or economic issue. We now need to consider it as a security concern," says U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL. "Many of the most severe effects of global warming are expected in regions where fragile governments are least capable of responding to them. Failing to recognize and plan for the geopolitical consequences of global warming would be a serious mistake.”

What all this means is that oil is a global liability which more domestic production cannot solve. Our economic security is affected by global forces, and oil consumed anywhere affects climate change everywhere. We could wait for the world’s oil supplies to finally run out or, more likely, to become too expensive for anyone to use. But that default path would involve more wars, more economic crises and more climate change.

Before we despair, it’s important to acknowledge that there is good news to report in the global energy picture. I’ll talk about that in Part III.

But back to the key question of this post: The Constitution puts the President in control of our foreign policy. Which of the presidential candidates will be the best architect? He will be the one who offers the best and most concrete ideas to wrestle control of our economy and foreign policy away from oil. And he’ll need more than concrete ideas; he’ll need vision of a post-petroleum world economy and the ability to rally people around it. He’ll need to withstand enormous opposition from those vested in the status quo. He’ll need the respect and cooperation of other world leaders who recognize that oil has been in control of global affairs for far too long.

• ‹ previous
• up
• next ›