Fellow Americans, Let's Connect The Dots Regarding Our Oil Addiction, Both At Home And Abroad

...OR, LET'S STOP FEEDING THE PETRO-AUTHORITARIAN STATES BY FINALLY ACTING LIKE INNOVATIVE AMERICANS AGAIN AND TRYING SOMETHING NEW (WHICH IS TO SAY SOMETHING OTHER THAN IMPORTING OIL AND/OR MASSIVE INCREASED DOMESTIC DRILLING...).

The United States buys oil from Venezuela. Yes, we also buy oil from ourselves and the Canadians and the Saudis and others throughout the world, but we buy a not-insubstantial amount of oil from the Venezuelans, as well. Our money helps to feed the Venezuelan economy, which to a certain extent is a good thing, but it also increasingly helps to line the pockets of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Unless you're some sort of cloistered academic long into your tenured years, you must recognize that Mr. Chavez is no feel-good, left-wing messiah, but rather a megalomaniac pariah with delusions of grandeur who utilizes socialist rhetoric in order to do little more than attract sketchy friends for sketchy reasons.

I bring all of this up because Mr. Chavez has long-since attempted to purchase admittedly aging but still functional Soviet-era nuclear submaries from the Kremlin, in order to begin to challenge the United States in both the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. He's been very open and vocal about this, and he's been at it for years now. At first, I'm sure his bellowings seemed rather silly to the higher-ups of various Western nations--indeed, some openly laughed at him, which of course attracted more naive folks to his cause, particularly given the unnecessary and counter-productive bellicosity of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. Yet slowly but surely, he's getting closer and closer to his goal, and alarms are starting to go off (if only occasionally at present) in Washington, D.C. and in the seats of other Western powers.

Though hardly reported at all in the American press (oh, what that must say about American cultural insularity at present...), an announcement was made a few weeks ago stating clearly that the Russian navy would conduct what it termed as "joint exercises with Venezuela" in the Caribbean Sea sometime this fall. The Economist magazine has a concise description of what will supposedly occur:

"...Russia has confirmed that it will be sending [to Venezuelan waters] the flagship of its Baltic fleet, the nuclear-powered cruiser 'Peter The Great.' In all, there will be four Russian ships, with a combined crew of 1,000...."

Russia has also sent a few bombers to the area, ostensibly in retaliation for the U.S.'s involvement in the Georgia fiasco. The U.S., for its part, has woken-up to the threat (at least to a certain extent), and has decided to resurrect its "Fourth Fleet" from the dead for the first time since 1950 (!) in order to "patrol the area."

Of course, this is not a re-run of the Bay of Pigs; at present, it's not even close to that knife-edge scenario. Yet this has been in the pipeline (pun intended) for years now. Once again, according to The Economist:

"Venezuela has already spent over $4 billion on Russian weaponry. This includes dozens of helicopters, 100,000 Kalishnikov rifles and 24 Sukhoi-30 fighter-bombers--among the world's most sophisticated fighter aircraft. On his latest arms-buying trip to Moscow, in July, Mr. Chavez said Venezuela was...[Russia's] 'strategic ally' and shared 'the same vision of the world.'"

Now, some of the purchases Mr. Chavez has made from Russia are technological jokes (and those leaky submarines have yet to fully make an appearance), but some of them are not. Certainly, too, all of these purchases combined cannot challenge the might of the American military. But they are a worrying trend in two respects: first, they suggest that a sustained Russian military presence, in one form or another, in the Caribbean Sea is being worked-out between the two countries (rumors of Russian military bases on Venezuelan territory are rampant, and Venezuela's denials of such a situation have been limp, to say the least); secondly, some of these Russian arms are being purchased by Venezuela with U.S. funds, derived from the sale of oil to the United States. (Obviously, as previously stated, they sell oil to other countries, as well.)

Last spring, I posited that the U.S. and Europe would coalesce more than they have over the previous decade or so in order to counter a rising threat from Russia. While many other folks have been screaming about China in a sustained manner, I suggested that coalescing with Europe and India would be a strong step to confronting a possible Russian-Chinese alliance. That FINALLY seems to be happening, slowly but surely, in a number of manners, which suggests that the Bush Administration is actually half-listening to those, primarily Democrats and Independents, who have been calling for a change of course; it will surely accelerate once the derided Bush Administration, still not trusted by many of our strategic partners, has left the White House.

My hopes were that the U.S would also step up its efforts to continue to bring China, slowly but surely, into the fold, while also pressuring the Chinese to level-out the economic playing field a bit more, which is an admittedly tricky thing to pull off. Interestingly enough, both Senators Obama and McCain argue in a forthcoming edition of the U.S. business magazine "China Brief" that the U.S. and China need to consolidate their partnership to a greater extent on issues of trade and nuclear proliferation. Some of this must be due to the alarms that the Kremlin is presently setting off in Washinton, D.C....

With the Russians taking advantage of the U.S. being bogged-down in Afghanistan and Iraq by invading Georgia, and with the Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltic states presently in an extreme state of worry that any one of them might be next (when I lived in the U.K. from 2005 to late 2007, Russia turned off the gas lines to Ukraine on a few occasions...in the middle of the harsh Ukrainian winter, after Ukraine disagreed with it on a number of policies), the Russian Bear is indeed beginning to make noise and crash around again. And it's not crashing around in a haphazard manner; unlike Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltic States, Georgia is not at present located very close to European NATO countries, which suggests that Russia is on the move in militarily soft, geographically nebulous locations at present (which we see in their stepped-up effort near previously militarily-soft Venezuela, and the U.S.'s very recent response to it).

Hence, the worry regarding Venezuela and, by extention, Russia. Both Venezuela and Russia are oil-rich countries, and both are benefitting massively at present from a worldwide transfer of wealth from other countries to them. So, the answer is to drill extensively here in the U.S. in order to detach ourselves from petro-authoritarian states (many of which I have not even discussed in this post), right?

Wrong. Or at least mostly wrong. I, for one, would accept congress legislating some limited amounts of accelerated domestic drilling if it meant a far more rapid transition to alternative forms of energy, including wind, solar, bio-fuels (hopefully not overly corn-based), nuclear (and, yes, folks, Senator Obama did indeed suggested that increased "safe nuclear power" must be a part of a new American energy package; anyone who suggests otherwise didn't see his convention speech, because it was right there in it), and the like. Senator Obama has suggested that this is the way to go. Senator McCain says heavy amounts of drilling must accompany this.

Setting the environment and global warming to the side for a moment, on paper, Senator McCain might look to be right. But his strategy misses a huge point, one I've made before but one that I'm not sure many of my fellow Americans understand fully: at present, the U.S. sets the global trends. We are still the monster economy of this world, and as we go, so too does much of the rest of the world (developed and developing). I cannot tell you how many foreign countries I've been in where folks have had one eye (at least) on Washington, D.C., in order to see where the U.S. would go strategically insofar as energy is concerned, because they knew that wherever the U.S. went, they would largely have to follow. People can deny it to themselves all they want, but it's reality.

But it may not be reality for much longer, given what Fareed Zakaria correctly terms the present "rise of the rest" of the world. We're still the big boy on the block--by far--but a decade down the line we're not going to look as big as we do now (especially if we fail to recognize this fact and adjust accordingly). So we've got a sort of "power-window" at present, and during this window we can help to set a worldwide template for energy use in the twenty-first century. (What we have at present--in much of the world--is a flabby extention of twentieth-century energy use.) This template could be an extention of our addiction to oil (which has been a cheap source of energy for a while, so it's understandable that we're a bit scared about dropping it so quickly), at which point nearly everyone else extends and expands their oil policies. In that scenario, if we don't buy Venezuelan or Russian or Iranian oil, someone else certainly will, which will continue the massive transfer of wealth to such petro-authoritarian states. Or....

Or we can act like Americans again, which is to say we can coalesce internally and with our strategic partners the world over in order to create a truly new energy revolution that will be painful in many ways but less painful (and less dangerous) than the long-term consequences of doubling-down on our dependency on oil. We can put our innovation to the test again, as we did when we put a man on the moon, and just as we did during that moment in history, we can find a common cause around which we can unite first as a nation and secondly as a conglomeration of free-thinking peoples and nations around the world. In doing so, we can shift (probably more rapidly than we at present think) the international paradigm regarding energy procurement, security, and use, and the Hugo Chavezes of the world will fade--if little by little, and slowly but surely.

There are no perfect energy strategies, but there is an energy crisis, and it will most likely continue to get worse in a steady manner in many parts of the world (including many parts of the U.S.) if we stick with the same old strategies and paradigms for much longer. My suggestion is that we bite the bullet now and show the rest of the world that Americans are not the intellectually lazy, creatively deprived, decadent individuals we are so often perceived to be, but rather strategically-thinking, innovative people who can do as we have done in the past--adjust, sometimes slightly and at other times massively, to fit the needs of the day. The need for energy adjustment is growing exponentially now, and it will be far more massive down the line. Why not start today by actually weaning ourselves off of oil rather rapidly?

Impossible, huh? Well, people once thought the same about going to the moon....