The kingdoms of earth run on oil
And that’s one of Iran’s problems these days.
From Victor Davis Hanson:
Snce World War II, the United States has been involved in a series of crises and wars in the Middle East on the premise of protecting U.S., Western, or global interests, or purportedly all three combined. Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the hub of three continents, and of three great religions, and the maritime intersection between East and West.
In modern times American strategic concerns in no particular order were usually the following:
1) Guaranteeing reliable oil supplies for the U.S. economy.
2) Ensuring that no hostile power—most notably the Soviet Union between 1946-1989 and local Arab or Iranian strongmen thereafter—gained control of the Middle East and used its wealth and oil power to disrupt the economies and security of the Western world, Europe in particular…
But two questions now arise in the 21st century: to what degree do strategic reasons remain for a strong U.S. ground presence in the Middle East and, in terms of cost-benefit analyses, how much material, human, and psychic U.S. investment is necessary to protect our interests to the extent they still matter in the region?
…our old strategic reasons do not necessarily still apply.
The United States does not need Middle East natural gas or oil. Europe does. China does even more.
Certainly, it may be in the larger economic interests of America to keep moderately priced oil flowing from the Middle East. But disruptions, cartels, and embargoes do not matter to the United States in the degree they did during the last half-century.
This reality is especially germane when the European Union, larger and nearly as rich as the United States, simply will not provide for its own security, despite its proximity to the region and its dependence upon it. China likewise freeloads on the U.S. Navy’s deterrent presence in waters off the Middle East.
These new realities do not necessarily mean we should vacate the region entirely, only that we should be far less likely to intervene when others have far more at stake.
Our current reduction in dependence on foreign oil has been the direct result of Trump and the right undoing policies that Obama and the left had put in place. The continuation of that lack of dependence – and our subsequent freedom from catering so powerfully to various oil-rich countries of the Middle East – requires that Republicans willing to continue the policies of Trump (and/or increase dependence on sources such as nuclear power) remain in control.
The title of this post comes from a passage I remember from Leon Uris’ Exodus. It was published in 1958, and I read it as a very young child (I was fond of the sweeping historical novels of Michener, as well). You can find an excerpt here
“Let me tell you something, man. I sat here at this desk during the war as one report after another of Arab sellouts came in. The Egyptian Chief of Staff selling secrets to the Germans; Cairo all decked out to welcome Rommel as their liberator; the Iraqis going to the Germans; the Syrians going to the Germans; the Mufti of Jerusalem a Nazi agent. I could go on for hours. You must look at Whitehall’s side of this, Bruce. We can’t risk losing our prestige and our hold on the entire Middle East over a few thousand Jews.” Sutherland sighed. “And this is our most tragic mistake of all, Sir Clarence. We are going to lose the Middle East despite it.” “You are all wound up, Bruce.” “There is a right and a wrong, you know.” General Sir Clarence Tevor-Browne smiled slightly and shook his head sadly. “I have learned very little in my years, Bruce, but one thing I have learned. Foreign policies of this, or any other, country are not based on right and wrong. Right and wrong? It is not for you and me to argue the right or the wrong of this question. The only kingdom that runs on righteousness is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdoms of the earth run on oil. The Arabs have oil.” Bruce Sutherland was silent. Then he nodded. “Only the kingdom of heaven runs on righteousness,”
The less dependent we are on foreign oil, the more we don’t have to cater to regimes that are detestable.
Neo, I think the reduction is more directly due to technological breakthroughs in fracking and exploration. Obama wanted renewables to be part of his hagiographic legacy, and declared millions of acres to be off-limits to drilling. Not to mention his sinking of hundreds of millions of our dollars into his friends and supporters’ green boondoggles. Yet in 2019 he attempted to take credit for high domestic production and comparatively low gasoline prices. What a shameless little schmuck he is.
I give the Trump administration credit for the robustness of our economy due to its reversing course from the “boots on their necks” mentality that marked the prior administration and its numerous nameless little bureaucratic minions. But in my opinion oil and gas exploration and production already flourished in spite of efforts by Obama to quell it. And would have continued to do so, even if our current president had turned out to be a ‘greenie’.
Furthermore, there’s the inconvenient little fact that such energy-producing technologies as wind and solar are, at least at this time, far too inefficient (not to mention expensive) to provide us with dependable, affordable options.
Writes Hanson: The United States does not need Middle East natural gas or oil.
I find this a peculiar, if now somewhat commonplace, expression of the energy needs of the US in the much deeper context of the world energy needs.
Offered, say, beyond top dollar (4x) in a genuine shortage crisis, are we to think US producers will disdain to sell their marginal barrel for less at home? Or are we to think it is merely up to the US government to seize the producers’ oil in order to keep it here at a price Government determines? Kinda fucked up, right?
So, what do we need, again?
OlderandWheezier has it about right.
Fracking is 40 going on 50 years old, but fracking plus horizontal precision drilling has really exploded in the last 20 years. Guys like Aubrey McClendon and Harrold Hamm really drove the technology hard, such that nat. gas is just in a complete glut in the U.S.
However, New England is at least partially cut off from nat. gas elsewhere in the U.S. because NY state (& others?) won’t allow pipelines to be built. I think New England gets some gas from Canada, and I know there have been plans for LNG importation ports in some harbors, though I don’t know if any were ever completed.
I’ve read conflicting things about whether Trump really got the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines going again.
Obama shut down much of the drilling on fed. lands, but fortunately there was still quite a lot on opportunity on private lands. Off shore drilling was stopped for a while under Obama but then resumed. The old Alaska pipeline is an interesting case, as it was very expensive, the old sources are dwindling, and if the flows get too small the whole thing will irretrievably freeze solid.
_____
Someone on the business news yesterday was claiming the protecting the Strait of Hormuz is of primary interest to the Chinese and Asians, for the reasons that Neo states. It is often correctly stated that the U.S. is now a net exporter of oil, but …
In addition to the screwed up situation in New England, there is the problem of refining crude oil. Crude oil comes in a range of sulfur contents and a range of molecular weights. Refineries need to be tailored to certain types of crude oil, and little or no new refinery infrastructure has been built in decades.
Because of the explosion of oil produced by fracking, the U.S. oil production has switched from heavy and sour, towards light and sweet, thus much of our refinery capacity can’t handle it. Because of NIBYism and watermelon greenies, who love to fly but can’t stand anything related to oil, we seem to be unable to build what we need.
I think, but am not sure, that much of the gasoline we burn is imported and we then export the oil we can’t use. This odd import/export is also caused by places like France where their old refineries produce too much gasoline, but not enough diesel fuel. Though I think Europe is becoming increasingly hostile to diesel in recent years.
Neo, you did hit the proverbial nail on its head. We need to keep Rep in charge, otherwise the Dems will stop all fracking. Here in CO we are already seeing that coming. In my wife’s church there are several anti-frackers (those that are known). I told her to ask if they want to pay $5 or $6 or $7 gal for gas, if it were available. And would be just for starters. Everything would go up. As some are wont to say “the poor would be hardest hit”. Of course most of us be become very fast.
Neo !
Off-topic, but I’m breaking in here to paste a link about some good news:
https://www.fox19.com/2020/01/07/cnn-settles-lawsuit-with-nick-sandmann/
I was searching for the names of pipelines (Dakota Access I forgot) and Bing is as heavily weighted to left wing publications as Google is. So above my article on pipelines is a section heading on Anti-Semitism.
https://truthout.org/topics/anti-semitism/
Oh boy. Just the article titles are amazing, and I love the names of the publications:
TruthOut, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams
The other thing is, let’s say the US used all and only its own oil (excellent point made above about refinery capabilities and the type of oil being produced, but let’s just say, for a moment).
We emphatically do not produce enough oil to provide for ourselves AND our allies – even our closest allies, to say nothing of the more tenuous ones. Someone else will be providing their oil. It needs to matter to us who that someone is. There’s a reason we have objected to the proposed Russian pipeline to Germany; we don’t want Germany to be so dependent on a power that is at least a rival if not an active enemy. (I’ve lost track of the status of that project now but I know we were attempting to block or discourage it. Artfldgr? You always seem to know stuff.) If we decide we don’t “need” to be involved in the ME, where much of the world’s oil still is, we may be thrusting some of our allies into hostile hands and reshaping the world map in ways we won’t enjoy down the line.
Basically I guess I’m still a neocon, if a sadder and warier one then I once was.
OlderandWheezier:
I wrote “Trump and the right” and “Obama and the left”. The left tried to stop fracking, and succeeded in doing so in certain states. Also, the pipeline was part of what I was referencing, as well as Obama’s federal ban. I have little doubt that if the left were in charge they would try to ban it not just on federal land but somehow find a way to ban it in every state.
This is the sort of thing I mean:
Harris is gone, but the others are top contenders.
So besides San Francisco and Boston and New York City and DC being flooded by climate change the Greens and the Blues in New England are freezing due to lack of Natural Gas.
Living next to the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water means I should care about those Socialist idiots because …
well … why again?
I live in fly-over territory. They didn’t and don’t care about me. Stupidity SHOULD hurt.
Modern societies float on a sea of energy, most of which is provided by gas and oil. Thus far the only workable substitute for fossil fuels is nuclear power. And even nuclear will not power airplanes or wheeled vehicles (Except all electric vehicles, which are poor substitutes for gas powered vehicles.)
Twenty years ago the fear was “peak oil.” The world was believed to be running out of oil. Fracking and horizontal drilling along with better seismic exploration abilities has suddenly opened up large new sources of fossil fuels. Peak oil is dead for now. But now all fossil fuels are under a cloud due to “Climate Change.” That’s a whole ‘nuther discussion.
That said, oil is still a dominant driver of international relations. Those countries that don’t have it ( Japan, the Koreas, India, much of Europe, much of South America, most of sub-equatorial Africa, etc.) must buy it from the big producers (Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Venezuela, Emirates, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, etc.) if they want to maintain a modern society. Therefore, oil is a strategic material of much importance. Unfortunately, much of the supply lies under Muslim countries. A fact that has made them far ore important in world affairs than they otherwise would be.
VDH is correct that the West has feared that some major power,such as Russia, would gain control over the Middle East oil reserves and be able to strangle the economies of the West. Thus, our engagement there since the end of WWII.
Even though our oil supplies are secure and growing, since oil is an international commodity traded in dollars, oil producing nations are still important to our economic well being. I’m old enough to remember the OPEC embargoes of the
1970s. They had a severe effect on the airline, trucking, agriculture, and other fossil fuel dependent industries. They were probably the major cause of the inflation that we saw in the late 1970s. We want to avoid a replay if we can.
What VDH seems to believe is that we can remain engaged in the ME without a big military footprint and the use of the carrot and stick technique to try to keep events there from spiraling out of control. Well, we tried nation building and found it didn’t work. It’s not an easy problem. Maybe this is the right path.
I have pondered the question of how much we should worry about keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. On the one hand, our European and Japanese allies need the petroleum products that pass through there. OTOH, China is also very dependent on that petroleum, and I am not eager to grease their economic skids with defense by the USN, especially since China is messing with the USN in their own nearby sealanes. But just how to get them to pay for the defense we provide the fuel they receive, at the price they receive it, because of our defense of the Straits? Perhaps we should put Google or Microsoft in charge of our Navy: they seem to have figured out how to squeeze money out of every other thing they touch.
Think about VDH’s “China likewise freeloads on the U.S. Navy’s deterrent presence in waters off the Middle East.”
China HAS TO HAVE Iranian oil. Has to. The USN is there in armed opposition to Iran’s aggressive sorties, and perhaps, probably, it should not be. Let China do its own sea lane protecting! I doubt Iran will attack the ships of one of its best customers.
The USN is protecting the Strait of Hormuz for which nations?
The EU? China? Are you kidding me?
The USN is there to provide prompt counterstrikes to Iran in the event of provoked need.
One of the greatest developments of this country is the development of fracking which has lead to our energy independence. And it should come as NO surprise that the inventor of fracking is from Columbus, Nebraska.
We don’t need ME oil and gas now. I say take out Iran’s nuke infrastructure and the let the Sunni and Shia cut each other’s heads off.
Tommy Jay
People in NY should go protest what Fredo’s brother has done with pipelines.
On Keystone, there has been no building in Nebraska yet. I expect massive civil disobedience once the bulldozers get going.
F,
Western European nations are NOT our allies. The accuracy of the ‘ally’ label is easily identified, to what degree do they vote in the U.N. with America? To the degree that they vote against our interests is the degree to which the label ‘ally’ applies.
Iran attacked one of our bases in Iraq, fyi. Most have probably heard this. Dow futures down roughly 300 at this moment, fwiw. Market has looked highly vulnerable anyway. If our forces respond with strikes on those 52 sites, what will there be left of Iran militarily? I would assume very little and their strike was suicidal.
Allowing or preventing Iran from seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz is logistically, a mixed bag. However, allowing Iran to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz would be rewarding terrorism. An appropriate and proportional response to Iran attempting to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz would be to eliminate Iran’s oil production and port facilities.
Well, we tried nation building and found it didn’t work. I
1. What’s ‘nation building’?
2. Define ‘work’?
Iran attacked one of our bases in Iraq, fyi.
In Kenya.
Iraq. More than one base, apparently. Missiles.
Video, missiles launching.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1214700496939712512
Art Deco:
“1. What’s ‘nation building’?
2. Define ‘work’?”
Nation building is the process of trying to turn a “Gap” nation into a modern “Core” nation. Read Thomas P. M. Barnett’s book, “The Pentagon’s New Map,” to get the idea that was quite popular with the foreign policy and military establishment back in 2003. I liked the idea back in the day also. But that was before I learned about the retrograde effects of Islamism. I had hoped Iraq might become another Turkey. Instead, Turkey has become more like Iraq.
“Work” would mean that Iraq and Afghanistan would be somewhat stable democracies after all these years of our attempts to turn them into stable, self-governing entities. Instead, both will go back to being governed by Islamic fundamentalists when we leave. The problem being that, with the oil money available to the Islamists, they will continue to wage jihad on us and the rest of the West.
Now, let me know where I’m wrong. I always like to learn.
I’m just going by wiki, so I’m open to more reliable sources, but this assertion does not jibe with the data.
As you can see, total net imports have been going down rather dramatically since around 2007.
Thanks for those explanations, J.J. And thanks for some (imo) very good posts.
The Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) has been up and running for a while and transports roughly half of the Bakken shale (fracked) oil out of the N. Dakota area. It was very nearly completed when Trump was elected but was held up by last minute demonstrations and court actions, which Trump cut through.
Prior to the DAPL opening, all that oil was transported via train cars primarily and trucks secondarily. A train loaded with Bakken light crude crashed in the town of Lac-Megantic in 2013 and burned much of the tiny town and killed 42-47 people. Pipelines are the most efficient and safest way to transport fuel by far.
TommyJay
Pipelines are the most efficient and safest way to transport fuel by far.
I wonder if Burlington Northern RR owner Warren Buffet was funding the anti-pipeline protesters.
Follow the fearing money, Gringo has a good point. In the 1980’s the price of oil was going up so much a hell of a lot of drilling was occurring in Texas and Oklahoma and the ‘Sun States’ were looking good. Meanwhile the Northeast states were freezing and Reagan suddenly had so much oil coming in from the Middle East that the price of oil plummeted and banks, which were way extended, failed and the domestic oil industry turned to dust.
I was sitting on sail boat, in my wet slip, in Oklahoma City the day Penn Square Bank was the first to fail since the depression, my friends told me that bank had gone under and I was glad I had moved my banking to another bank who was better at loaning money to me a year before. We had no idea what the rapid drop in the price of oil would mean for the middle part of the United States and the number of people who would be put out of work because of that decision by Regan and I voted Democrat for several cycles after that debacle that cost me a lot of money.
Funny how that oil stuff works.
Old Tex: Neither Reagan nor any other president manipulates oil markets from boom to bust. You say ” Reagan suddenly had so much oil coming in from the Middle East”; do you mean that occurred on his watch, or that he was a factor in that shift? Remember, Middle East oil is not sweet Texas crude; it is harder to refine, needs dedicated refineries, and refineries don’t spring out of the ground overnight.
Thanks, OlderandWheezier. We old codgers got to stick together. 🙂
Manju on January 7, 2020 at 7:55 pm said:
* * *
Natural gas (your chart) is not oil.
They just live next to each other sometimes.
https://adventuresinenergy.org/What-are-Oil-and-Natural-Gas/How-Are-Oil-Natural-Gas-Formed.html
This one also shows a decline in US oil imports, beginning around 2008, but doesn’t extend into the Trump years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_imports
This one is interesting, although only for a single year, not a trendline; the US is still a net importer of oil, despite vast production.
Explanations??? Probably due to the type of oil, nature of refineries, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_oil_exports
Thanks AesopFan…Here’s one for oil itself, imports only, but broken down by country from which we import.
It shows imports peaking around 2005 and dropping after that.
AesopFan…If you look here, you’ll see that the US dips a toe into net-exporter range for the first time in Sept-Oct of 2019…after a rather dramatic decline in net imports that begins around 2006.
But if you click “annual” on the graph it won’t show us ever reaching net-exports…because they don’t have the data for the last two months yet.
I was sitting on sail boat, in my wet slip, in Oklahoma City the day Penn Square Bank was the first to fail since the depression, my friends told me that bank had gone under and I was glad I had moved my banking to another bank who was better at loaning money to me a year before.
If I’m not mistaken..
The people who lose money in a bank failure are the equity holders (always), unsecured creditors, and then secured creditors. Not quite sure of the order in which stakeholders are whacked. I think it might be be (1) interbank lenders, (2) bondholders, (3) holders of commercial paper, and (4) customers with uninsured deposits (which are almost all in business accounts, if I’m not mistaken). Cases where the FDIC shuts a bank and mails out checks to insured depositors are rare. Cases where the FDIC whacks various stakeholders and then runs the bank for an interim period ‘ere selling it off are more common but atypical. If I’m not mistaken, the modal resolution is that everyone down to the bondholders loses their stake and the residue of assets and liabilities are sold off within days.
My understanding of the situation in the southwest ca. 1990 was that the source of the problem was a massive commercial real estate bust and that the source of that was a spate of wildly imprudent lending by the operators of savings banks given unaccustomed leeway by statutory law and regulators. Glenn Reynolds has among his circle of friends a man who was on the board of a conventional George Bailey savings and loan at the time. The man told him: “we thought borrowing at 5% to lend at 10% was a pretty good business to be in, so we didn’t get involved in the exotic stuff”; his bank survived the crash pretty well. There’s a 60-something accountant who posts under the handle ‘T Shaw’ who was working in the industry at the time and knows the ins and outs. The failures were so systemic in the s & l sector that it did require a dedicated receiver be set up to supervise the mergers and liquidations, which took about five years to complete. IIRC, the resolution authority ended up owning a mess of physical assets it had to auction off, including (at one point) a…’gentlemen’s club’.
Will someone tell Victor Davis Hanson that oil is fungible? Supply interruptions anywhere will generate price shocks, no matter who the specific customers of said country’s oil be. Loss of physical access is of concern in your war planning. If you’re concerned about physical access in the event of a breakdown in reliable global trade routes (see 1939 to 1945), you’re also concerned about having domestic reserves you can tap (which should induce a bias in favor of reliance on imports in times of piece, provided you’ve got the capital and technology to rapidly ramp up domestic production in times of war).
Just my $0.02
Nation building is the process of trying to turn a “Gap” nation into a modern “Core” nation.
Technological applications, process improvements, associated labor release from agriculture (with concomitant changes in settlement patterns) make the difference between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ societies. The Maddison has ample data on historical levels of domestic product per capita.
There are 32 countries in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia
If you bracket out that attributable to oil and mineral exports and add some fudge factors to correct for skewed income distributions and the widespread use of guest workers, you find about nine countries in that set which have levels of per capita product below those found in late Victorian Britain. Several have been ravaged by civil war or chronic insurgency (Afghanistan, Yemen, Tajikistan, Syria, Libya, and the Sudan). Others are located where the Arab world meets Tropical Africa (Mauritania, the Sudan). Others have been injured by institutional disruption and mass departure of human capital (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan). For the majority of countries in that part of the world, their real per capita product (with the adjustments noted) improves on that of the United States ca. 1929.
In about 1/3 of these countries, the share of the labor force deployed to agriculture exceeds 25%, what prevailed in the U.S. ca. 1929. I think in Afghanistan and Pakistan (not anywhere else) it exceeds 40%, what prevailed in the U.S. in 1880.
The Arab world tends to lag in the realm of education. The U.S. had achieved an adult literacy rate of about 85% during the late Victorian period and about 95% on the eve of the Depression. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, and the North African states tend to have deficient literacy rates (anywhere from 43% to 84% of the population over 15). Iran, the UAE, and Israel have literacy rates characteristic of the period in this country running from 1885 to 1910. In the remainder, literacy is as prevalent as it was in this country in 1929.
There is no place in the region (outside of the war ravaged countries) where life expectancy hasn’t at least reached what was common in the world’s affluent countries in 1929 (and it’s usually better). Fertility deficits of the sort bedeviling occidental countries are far less severe if they are present at all. There’s quite a bit of cruelty incorporated into family relations and divorce is rampant. At the same time, these societies seem to generate some salutary social controls.
For all the misery derived from political violence in that part of the world, you’d have to scrounge to find a place in that part of the world where homicides as ordinary street crime are demonstrably more frequent than they are in the U.S., much less what prevails in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. And, of course, Muslim countries have been among those most resistant to the introduction of legal abortion and other depredations found in occidental countries.
These really aren’t pre-modern countries, even if they’re underperforming and troubled in various ways.
. But that was before I learned about the retrograde effects of Islamism. I had hoped Iraq might become another Turkey. Instead, Turkey has become more like Iraq.
Turkey doesn’t bear much resemblance to Iraq prior to 2003 or to Iraq as we speak.
Turkey’s at the high end of the world’s middle income countries and has been economically dynamic enough that it’s conceivable it will break into the ranks of the world’s affluent countries in the next decade. It’s export sector is adequately diversified and less than 7% of its revenue is attributable to fuel and minerals.
It has suffered severe deterioration in the quality of its political life since 2002 and the political opposition has been subject to escalating levels of harassment and abuse. In that respect, it bears the closest resemblance to Russia ca. 2004. It has a nagging insurgency, but this is confined to a slice of the country where perhaps 10% of the population lives (in contrast to Iraq, where political violence is a mundane reality where 50% of the population lives). Iraq has a very fragmented political party system; Turkey suffers under a political machine that likely cannot now be dislodged conventionally. (Turkey, for all its deficiencies, isn’t the totalitarian hell-hole that was Ba’athist Iraq). Electoral institutions function passably in most every region of the globe and in countries at all income levels. The Arab world and points adjacent is (next to China) the part of the world most resistant to them. That something is chancy doesn’t render it impossible. Even a country as troubled as Iraq hasn’t suffered the sort of institutional implosion you saw during Mohammed Morsi’s tenure in Egypt.
Quick question for those who want China to defend its own interests in the Gulf: Do you really want China to develop the blue-water navy capabilities to do that? Right now they are mostly confined to their own coastal waters. It seems to me that a navy large enough to protect their own trade lanes (and that would include Africa to China as well as ME to China) would be a threat to the entire Indian/Pacific Oceans. No?
Waidmann
Oil and its sister, natural gas, are by far the cheapest reliable energy sources our tech level allows us to use safely. Depending on your definition of “safety” with respect to Nuclear Power, the regulation of which means that there is a very low likelihood of a catastrophe, but it remains true that such an accident could kill thousands.
I support nukes, and especially the not-yet-used by US Thorium reactors, but also see that “safe” is a huge matter of opinion.
Christian Capitalist civilization, as we know it, runs on energy. Nukes provide the most economical, non-CO2 producing energy. CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising, from around 200 ppm (parts per million; 0.0002%) up to over 400 ppm — but there is no good scientific experiments to show what that means for climate, now.
The alarmists claim, based on computer models, that it means warming. And especially big changes.
Funny sad that they oppose all tech steps to reduce climate change problems: storing water (man-made lakes) to reduce droughts and fight fires, deepening rivers and preparing for floods to reduce flood damage, higher building codes to reduce storm damage.
Droughts and floods and storms all cause damage, such damage should be reduced by more expensive mitigation measures.
Art Deco, I appreciate your detailed answers.
As far as Turkey is concerned, my concern is that it has proceeded from a reasonably well functioning Muslim democracy (a vey unusual thing) to being run by an Islamist strongman. Erdogan isn’t Saddam, but give him time. He’s working on it.
Iraq is struggling because of corruption and religious division (Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds) that cannot be overcome given that Islam wants to be both the religion and government of any majority Muslim country. Corruption is the norm in most Muslim countries with large oil incomes. Very tempting to have one’s hand in the oil cookie jar. If we leave, Iraq will probably have a civil war followed by becoming a Shiite theocracy allied with Iran. Division into separate Muslim sect states might seem an answer until you find that most of the oil is in the Shiite dominated areas. The Sunnis and Kurds would be left out and dominated by their rich Shiite neighbors who would be allied with Iran. This calculus and the Iran dominated militias in Iraq were a factor in the rise of ISIS.
Islamism is still the major feature that stands in the way of Muslim countries becoming both fully modern and well-behaved nations. As long as you have Islamists who want to kill or convert all infidels, who want to dominate the world in the name of Allah, and who have access to oil money; the Muslim world will continue to be unstable and dangerous. At least that’s my opinion.
has proceeded from a reasonably well functioning Muslim democracy (a vey unusual thing)
Its politicians made of its parliamentary system something of a jalopy. And the politicians were under the effective supervision of the military, who periodically punished them (in 1960-63, 1971-72, 1980-83, 1997) and ejected them from their positions. One aspect of Erdogan’s appeal has been his steady management of the economy in contrast to the performance of his predecessors.
Iraq is struggling because of corruption and religious division (Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds) that cannot be overcome given that Islam wants to be both the religion and government of any majority Muslim country.
It’s struggling because the military and the security forces cannot quite suppress organized political violence (though the frequency of this violence has gone up, down, up, and back down). It’s also struggling because of abnormal factional fragmentation, which adds great frictional costs to the task of assembling ministries and deciding on budget and policy. (The religious dispensation in any country is going to influence the normative assumptions which inform public policy formation).
If we leave, Iraq will probably have a civil war followed by becoming a Shiite theocracy
I wouldn’t put money on that proposition. The country has been under extreme stress for 15 years and that has yet to happen. And our troop presence there has been quite modest for the last 8 years.
Islamism is still the major feature that stands in the way of Muslim countries becoming both fully modern and well-behaved nations.
See Stanley Kurtz on the social anthropology of Arab societies, and what makes for a problematic public life therein. His model does not rely on ideational factors.
Thanks for the charts, Manju – I don’t question that the decline was occurring even under Obama (although I admit that I didn’t know the specific amounts, and was pleased to see how fast it happened), but my recollection (along with others’) is that he was fighting against increasing US domestic production tooth-and-nail, instead of expediting it, as Trump is doing.
Correct me if I am mistaken.
This is why we still want our own oil & gas, fungible though they might be, and why we are trying to persuade Europe to get off the Russian sauce.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/it_happens_again_russia_cuts_off_energy_lines_to_the_west.html
BTW, the US is not the only country whose policies have changed due to self-sufficiency in energy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Israel
Art Deco, I appreciate your take on my ideas. Your grasp of geography and politics of the ME is somewhat different from mine. I confess I’ve never been in the ME and all my opinions have been formed through reading the usual sources – blogs, books, news reports, Wiki, etc. Apparently we don’t read the same sources or put more credence in some sources than others. We aren’t miles apart in our views, but enough for you to want to express your opinion as being different. Probably a good thing neither of us are advising POTUS.
I live next door to a Muslim family. We are not close, as we seem to have very little in common. As a result, I have not been able to converse with them about their attitudes and beliefs. .They seem nice and happy to be in America, so there’s that. They don’t appear to embrace Islamism as they don’t avoid contact with us and don’t give us the evil eye, which we have experienced from some Muslims.
I have read Kurtz on occasion. His take on Islamism is not so different from mine, except that he stresses inbreeding as a major factor in Islam’s resistance and hatred of modernism. Inbreeding certainly explains some of it, but the Wahhabi doctrine as interpreted by Sayyid Qutb has been, IMO, a much greater influence on fundamentalist Islam since the 1950s.. Qutb’s “Mileposts” is one of the Sunni jihadi’s handbooks.
Your opinion of Erdogan is quite different from mine. However, I don’t claim to be a Turkish expert as you seem to be. Attaturk’s modernist reforms have been impossible to maintain. The military was the primary defender of those reforms as seen down through the years. Erdogan has blunted their power and proclaimed his allegiance to Islam and Islamic customs. He has become essentially a “strong man” who cannot be voted out of office.
It’s my contention that, without oil money, the Islamists would be a bunch of harmless rageaholics roaming in the sands of the ME. It is money that allows them wage assymetric warfare on a global basis.
Cheers.
It’s my contention that, without oil money, the Islamists would be a bunch of harmless rageaholics roaming in the sands of the ME.
The oil money has been in the possession of
1. Saudi Arabia, which has severe internal policies but quite bland interests-over-values foreign policy. The trouble it causes derives from paying protection money to political brigands.
2. The Gulf Emirates, who are fairly benign in their internal and external policies.
3. Algeria, a country whose regime has varied in it’s properties over 57 years but which has been consistently secular and (since 1992) violently antagonistic to its domestic islamist element.
4. Libya, currently in a semi-anarchic state. From 1969 to 2011 it was run by a nutty personalist-revanchist regime whose state ideology was an idiosyncratic brew cooked up by der fuhrer.
5. Azerbaijan: a secular post-Soviet state run by an impregnable political establishment descended from the Soviet-era Communist Party.
6. Kazakhstan: ditto
7. Indonesia: wherein the practice of Islam varies but within which lax observance and syncretism is modal. Political Islam in Indonesia is typically chill.
8. Brunei: a Southeast Asian analogue to the Gulf Emirates
9. Malaysia: a high middle income parliamentary state with largely secular political parties.
10. Nigeria: a multi-confessional country wherein islamism has little in the way of an electoral presence. There’s a gruesome batch of muslim insurrectionists operating in the country’s northeast, but they’re a criminal element with no access to the country’s oil revenues.
11. Iraq, which has been variously a quasi-parliamentary regime run by the Hashemites, Gen. Nuri Said, and the patron client networks assembled by local grandees; a trio of authoritarian regimes with a somewhat divergent character; a 35 year run of Ba’athist revanchism, perhaps the closest analogue to inter-war European fascism the world has seen in the last 70-odd years; and the beleaguered parliamentary regime in place in the last 16 years, which has an islamist vector, but is not in essence and Islamist regime.
12. Iran: which is the example consistent with your thesis. Iran’s oil exports might account for 8% of the sum of fuel exports in the twelve countries listed.
Art Deco: Nice list and I wouldn’t argue much with your summation of the politics of the various Muslim countries. However, as we know, al Qaeda has never been an organ of an official Muslim government. Bin Laden operated out of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan. His money came from his Saudi construction magnate father. The father’s fees were mostly the result of Saudi oil money. Oil money in Muslim countries finds its way to the jihadis. Like Christians who give money to missionaries, oil sheiks give money to jihadis to carry forth Allah’s work. 9/11 was accomplished with Saudi oil money. Without the money there would have been no 9/11. Without oil money there would have been no ISIS. Assymetric warfare is cheap, but it still requires a lot of money. Money that comes from oil sheiks with enough that $1 million is pocket change.
Iran has openly been at war with Israel and the U.S. for 40 years. They acknowledged it frequently in public forums, but they chose to use surrogates financed with their oil money to prosecute the war. We all know how that has gone. Many Americans dead or wounded financed by Iranian oil money – and more recently, by money given to them by you know who. They’re the only official Muslim government that officially promotes jihadism. Why? Because it’s a fundamentalist theocracy. The aim of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy is always converting or killing the infidels.
If only 10% of the 1.5 billion Muslims are fundamentalists who want to kill or convert all infidels, that’s 150 million potential troublemakers out there. Nothing to worry about, though. They can’t cause much trouble, right?
However, as we know, al Qaeda has never been an organ of an official Muslim government. Bin Laden operated out of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
I.e. he had state support.
His money came from his Saudi construction magnate father.
I don’t think his family was subsidizing him or even on speaking terms with him.
The father’s fees were mostly the result of Saudi oil money
His father’s company’s output was a consequence of the capital and human resources he brought to bear on projects. During the period running from 1978 through 2001, the ratio of oil and mineral exports to nominal GDP varied a great deal for Saudi Arabia; the median figure was about 0.33. Lots of other things going on there.
If only 10% of the 1.5 billion Muslims are fundamentalists who want to kill or convert all infidels, that’s 150 million potential troublemakers out there. Nothing to worry about, though. They can’t cause much trouble, right?
You have in this country about 4.9 million people in ‘protective service occupations’. Military, police, firefighters, &c. That’s the number of people willing to put their corpus where their mouth is. They amount to about 1.5% of the population. The number of people who are willing to do that while leading a clandestine existence with a price on their heads and no pension in their old age is a great deal smaller. The criminal element in a given society usually amounts to roughly 10% of the male population at any one time, so let’s wager 0.15%. Then you have to reduce that further to the share you can mobilize for social and political causes and then reduce it further to those who favor your preferred cause.
Art Deco, you do love to nit pick.
I have neither the time nor energy to debate you at length over issues that mean little.
I will note this: You say, “The number of people who are willing to do that while leading a clandestine existence with a price on their heads and no pension in their old age is a great deal smaller.” Committed jihadis are not motivated by dreams of an old age pension. They are, in their own words, ‘Dead men walking.” Dying in the cause of Islamism is a much more desirable career for them than what we think of in this culture. That there are enough of them around to have been killed in large numbers during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with still plenty of them left to carry on with the war on infidels, indicates that there is no shortage of jihadis.
Not to be disagreeable, but it seems you are more of an apologist for Islamists than one who sees them as a continuing threat. I suggest you need to spend a tiny bit of time perusing the Religion of Peace https://thereligionofpeace.com
It may not change your mind about the threat from Islamism, but it never hurts to look at the other side of the issue.
Committed jihadis are not motivated by dreams of an old age pension.
People who are abidingly unconcerned with such matters are, bar in odd circumstances, a small platoon.