Lawson for Congress

I just finished reading this fascinating commentary in the Wall Street Journal about why an American military presence is essential in the Persian Gulf, compliments of Mr. Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations. Here are some favorite quotes:

While U.S. import needs are projected to grow significantly, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf energy is not, thanks largely to expected production increases in the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. energy imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to remain below 20% of total consumption. The oil market, of course, is global, and if something were to happen to the Middle Eastern supplies, prices would rise world-wide, and the U.S. economy would be seriously disrupted. But domestic supply is not the key to American interest in the Gulf.

OK, excellent. So we don’t need to be there to secure our domestic energy needs.

For the past few centuries, a global economic and political system has been slowly taking shape under first British and then American leadership. As a vital element of that system, the leading global power — with help from allies and other parties — maintains the security of world trade over the seas and air while also ensuring that international economic transactions take place in an orderly way. Thanks to the American umbrella, Germany, Japan, China, Korea and India do not need to maintain the military strength to project forces into the Middle East to defend their access to energy. Nor must each country’s navy protect the supertankers carrying oil and liquefied national gas (LNG).

Wait… so our soldiers and tax dollars are paying to secure energy supplies for Germany, Japan, China, Korea, and India? Does that make sense?

For this system to work, the Americans must prevent any power from dominating the Persian Gulf while retaining the ability to protect the safe passage of ships through its waters. The Soviets had to be kept out during the Cold War, and the security and independence of the oil sheikdoms had to be protected from ambitious Arab leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Oh, I see. So it really is up to us. Since we’re the ones who helped put Saddam in power in the first place, we had to clean up that mess ourselves.

But wait — does anyone really believe that widespread piracy and looting of supertankers would prevail without a U.S. military presence? Would the oil companies, shipping companies, sellers, and buyers tolerate such chaos? That’s a ridiculous assertion on many levels: there are other sources of oil outside the Middle East, and the countries in the Persian Gulf are highly incented to get their oil safely to market. After all, they can’t drink it.

The end of America’s ability to safeguard the Gulf and the trade routes around it would be enormously damaging — and not just to us. Defense budgets would grow dramatically in every major power center, and Middle Eastern politics would be further destabilized, as every country sought political influence in Middle Eastern countries to ensure access to oil in the resulting free for all.

Hmmm… but our defense budget would shrink. And we would not need to borrow as much money to finance our deficits from (gulp) Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, China, and our Federal Reserve. Finally, what exactly is a “free for all” in this context? The oil certainly isn’t free for all, or free for any. It will only be available to those who have a valuable currency with which to purchase it.

The potential for conflict and chaos is real. A world of insecure and suspicious great powers engaged in military competition over vital interests would not be a safe or happy place. Every ship that China builds to protect the increasing numbers of supertankers needed to bring oil from the Middle East to China in years ahead would also be a threat to Japan’s oil security — as well as to the oil security of India and Taiwan. European cooperation would likely be undermined as well, as countries sought to make their best deals with Russia, the Gulf states and other oil rich neighbors like Algeria.

Is Mr. Mead suggesting that our current world is a “safe and happy place”? The amount of global insecurity and suspicion today is already staggering. Even more ironically, Mr. Mead then implies that we’re keeping China on a short leash to prevent her from threatening her Asian neighbors, when we are actually dependent on China’s willingness to lend us money to defend her oil tankers.

America’s Persian Gulf policy is one of the chief ways through which the U.S. is trying to build a peaceful world and where the exercise of American power, while driven ultimately by domestic concerns and by the American national interest, provides vital public goods to the global community.

I strongly disagree with the assertion that our Persian Gulf policy is an exemplar for how to build a peaceful world. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:25 pm and is filed under China, debt, no nation building, non-interventionism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.