NOT SO MUCH THEIR RUBICON AS THEIR WATERLOO
Jeff Berg
“There are two clocks ticking here one is geopolitical, the other is geological. The invasion of Iraq was the neo-con's vainglorious attempt to ensure a century's worth of hegemony by synchronizing the United State's geopolitical clock with the planet's geological one. They failed. Of the two the geopolitical one is now ticking much faster.” –Senor Juan G. Carbonel.
M.I.T. Professor Noam Chomsky agrees with many who are interested in the field of foreign relations that violence is certain to be at least part of America 's response to the continuing drift of Latin America from U.S.
control. The principal target of this violence will almost assuredly be Hugo Chavez personally as well as his political party in Venezuela .
My contention here will be that there is one other certainty to be had from this otherwise impossible to perfectly predict situation. And that is that while the U.S. and their quislings inside Venezuela may get Chavez individually (be it politically or physically) that is of course not the ultimate purpose of the exercise. And what is the ultimate purpose of this exercise is what they won't get. Which is exactly the same thing that they are not going to get in the Middle East . i.e. Effective control of the region's hydrocarbon resources. Nor will these exercises in "visiting the terrors of the earth" on the people of Latin America and the Middle East be able to create the kind of object lesson that the fruit bats at State and the Pentagon believe leads to hegemony over a region.
The world has fundamentally changed in the last five years and that change had almost nothing to do with 9/11. 9/11 simply provided the pretext necessary for those unaffectionately known in intelligence circles as "the crazies" to implement plans that they had been fulminating about for decades. For decades Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrahms, Kristal and other Likudniks and hawkish conservatives like Cheney and Rumsfeld have been agitating for taking advantage of the
U.S. 's principal advantage: it's unparalleled military superiority. Before 9/11 in the early 80's it was the "War on Terrorism" that provided the pretext needed for vicious incursions throughout the 80's into Latin America (yes this war is in fact a reprise; with largely the same cast)
Next up on the pretext parade was a reheating up of that old Cold War chestnut the fight against the "Evil Empire." After that went rather too well it became "Grabbing the Unipolar Moment" by taking advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to become the global hegemon.
In 1991 the last gasp of "Reaganism" (like Bush jr. a pitchman) and it's predilection for “muscular” foreign policy saw U.S. militarism take advantage of Saadam's invasion of Kuwait . This colossal misreading by Saadam of his former ally allowed hawkish U.S. decision makers (Cheney was Secretary of Defense at the time) to do just exactly what it is that they were looking to do anyway and that was to successfully mobilize the world to allow the
U.S. to make a military incursion into the Middle East. A region that everybody in the energy industry and at the highest levels of long term state planning has long known is the greatest store of fossil fuels in the world.
In fact within a decade the five Gulf States , Saudi Arabia , Iraq , Iran , Kuwait , and the UAE will comprise 2/3 of the world's oil supply. ( Iran , Qatar , Saudi Arabia and UAE are #2 thru #5 in natural gas reserves) Add in Russia Venezuela and Canada and you have over 80% of all oil pumped in the world. (Are there any who can still wonder at what the energy provisions in NAFTA were aimed?) Even more importantly by the end of those ten years we all but certainly will have passed the point where it is obvious to every single player that the production of oil has entered terminal decline.
What is paid less attention to but is of equal import is that by then it will be obvious even to the North American working class that the production of North America natural gas will never recover and that LNG cannot fill the gap. These twin declines being more terminal for the U.S. economy than any other industrialized nation on the planet. (Though Canada will by no means be unaffected.)
The worm has turned and now without many knowing it power has shifted away from military and economic power and towards those that control direct ownership of hydrocarbons. Not that this ownership hasn't long been a factor in world affairs. After all the Allies in the words of their highest generals "floated to victory on a sea of oil" in the second world war. Whereas Japan 's air force was essentially grounded for the last few months of the war and the German's were running on fumes by the war's end reduced to the drops they could squeeze from coal liquefaction. And it is hardly that the power of economics is about to disappear from the world stage but the power of the military to dictate geopolitics largely is, especially the U.S. military.
***N.B. Caveat. IF we are to have a future this is the future we are to have. If the U.S. decides to go down fighting it will in fact take the rest of us with them, permanently. No joke. As the mentats say, "This is a prime computation."
What is to change is that today those with direct ownership of oil and natural gas will no longer be the sultans of swing simply because of the (ever increasing) revenues that this activity generates. The shift is much more paradigmatic than that. Now ownership of oil and gas is about to become much more central to the control over their flow and the difference between having access and not having access is the difference being a second rate power and being a first rate one. Not to mention that it has always been the difference between the 18th Century and the 20th.
The U.S. imports 13,000,000 barrels of oil a day. This is no longer a mere liability from an economic and geopolitical standpoint, something that needs addressing at some point before it gets too critical from a balance of payments perspective. This is now a fundamental weakness that spells the Achilles heel of the entire project of the U.S. as a global superpower. (Forget PNAC I'm talking the difference between the U.S. as a first world nation and the U.S. as a post 1991 Russia.)
And when this plug gets pulled, when the U.S. is no longer able to access as much oil as it can use, the U.S. will like the Brits after the 1957 Suez crisis go down without a shot being fired. Suddenly on the geopolitical stage the U.S. will be not much more than Canada and Mexico 's problem. (and quite a problem they will be.) Now of course the U.S. will still be spectacularly powerful militarily speaking but all of those trillions will now be little more than museum pieces. Yes the U.S. will still use them to try and convince their own people that they are still "#1". And to an extent the U.S. will still be able to use the Nixonian "madman" tactic in order to wring economic concessions from their creditors. and the world will no doubt pay a minimal amount of deference to this ploy. If only to give
U.S. statesmen who are not in fact completely mad a way to save face and so keep power away from the lunatics that will come out of the woodworks in droves promising to return "America to Greatness".
But ultimately war, as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and every other military practitioner has always known and preached, is simply politics at its most brutal. And the purpose of war is not killing for killing's sake, even if it does devolve to that far more often than even politicians would like, but is instead for the purpose of gaining political/economic aims. As to what will be historically defined as the "trigger" moment. Whether it's OPEC finally creating the unity to allow it to say, "Hardball? You want to play hardball?" Or whether it's the collapse of the U.S. dollar and the fact that the U.S. simply doesn't have the money to run it's war machine anymore. (Gore Vidal's longtime prediction) Or whether it's because the U.S. people finally wake up to their peril and put a stop to the incredible wastefulness and corruption that is sinking their ship. Or whether it's some combination of these factors and a few others that I haven't gone into here matters not. What matters is that the military might of the U.S. will not stop what geology is dictating to the socio-economic organizations we have created in the last 150 years.
Energy since the advent of industrialism and the large scale extraction of coal has been at the center of economics from the standpoint of profit, large fortunes, political power and military superiority. Now it is about to move center stage as the prime mover of geopolitical events for at least the next few decades. This seismic event will be most shocking for the U.S. in particular not only because of their great dependence but because once they lose their position as the world's greatest economy, the buyer of last resort and the bankroller of international initiatives, the world will be much more willing to bring them to task about regulating their emissions.
And while U.S. coal reserves are nowhere near what the EIA says they are (yet another fine U.S. institution corrupted) they are along with their forests sufficient for the U.S. to present a clear and present danger to the world if they chose to meet their economic collapse by burning every bricket and cord they can get their hands on. There is unfortunately every likelihood that the U.S. government will be more than willing to play brinksmanship politics with this card. They are after all a military culture that is used to getting their way and used to bringing the most hideous weapons into play when brooked: DU, Agent Orange, Cluster Bombs, Whiskery Pete, etc. It will also have the quite possibly irresistible allure of being one of the very few weapons left to them.
There is of course a chance albeit slight that weakness and dependence on the goodwill of others may do what nothing else ever has: make the U.S. power elite responsive to the ROW's opinions. And lest we forget, that most Pollyanish hope of all. That collapse will bring sanity and a level of democracy within the U.S. that exactly meets the hopes and dreams they have long held out to a even longer suffering world. Let us hope, let us hope.
