Nineteen years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall effectively eliminated
the Soviet Union as the world's other superpower. Yes, the USSR as a
political entity stumbled on for another two years, but it was clearly
an ex-superpower from the moment it lost control over its satellites
in Eastern Europe.
Less than a month ago, the United States similarly lost its claim
to superpower status when a barrel crude oil roared past $110 on the
international market, gasoline prices crossed the $3.50 threshold at
American pumps, and diesel fuel topped $4.00. As was true of the USSR
following the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the USA will no doubt
continue to stumble on like the superpower it once was; but as the
nation's economy continues to be eviscerated to pay for its daily oil
fix, it, too, will be seen by increasing numbers of savvy observers as
an ex-superpower-in-the-making.
That the fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the erasure of the Soviet
Union's superpower status was obvious to international observers at
the time. After all, the USSR visibly ceased to exercise dominion over
an empire (and an associated military-industrial complex) encompassing
nearly half of Europe and much of Central Asia. The relationship
between rising oil prices and the obliteration of America's superpower
status is, however, hardly as self-evident. So let's consider the
connection.
Dry Hole Superpower
The fact is, America's wealth and power has long rested on the
abundance of cheap petroleum. The United States was, for a long time,
the world's leading producer of oil, supplying its own needs while
generating a healthy surplus for export.
Oil was the basis for the rise of the first giant multinational
corporations in the U.S., notably John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil
Company (now reconstituted as Exxon Mobil, the world's wealthiest
publicly-traded corporation). Abundant, exceedingly affordable
petroleum was also responsible for the emergence of the American
automotive and trucking industries, the flourishing of the domestic
airline industry, the development of the petrochemical and plastics
industries, the suburbanization of America, and the mechanization of
its agriculture. Without cheap and abundant oil, the United States
would never have experienced the historic economic expansion of the
post-World War II era.
No less important was the role of abundant petroleum in fueling
the global reach of U.S. military power. For all the talk of America's
growing reliance on computers, advanced sensors, and stealth
technology to prevail in warfare, it has been oil above all that gave
the U.S. military its capacity to "project power" onto distant
battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Every Humvee, tank,
helicopter, and jet fighter requires its daily ration of petroleum,
without which America's technology-driven military would be forced to
abandon the battlefield. No surprise, then, that the U.S. Department
of Defense is the world's single biggest consumer of petroleum, using
more of it every day than the entire nation of Sweden.
From the end of World War II through the height of the Cold War,
the U.S. claim to superpower status rested on a vast sea of oil. As
long as most of our oil came from domestic sources and the price
remained reasonably low, the American economy thrived and the annual
cost of deploying vast armies abroad was relatively manageable. But
that sea has been shrinking since the 1950s. Domestic oil production
reached a peak in 1970 and has been in decline ever since -- with a
growing dependency on imported oil as the result. When it came to
reliance on imports, the United States crossed the 50% threshold in
1998 and now has passed 65%.
Though few fully realized it, this represented a significant
erosion of sovereign independence even before the price of a barrel of
crude soared above $110. By now, we are transferring such staggering
sums yearly to foreign oil producers, who are using it to gobble up
valuable American assets, that, whether we know it or not, we have
essentially abandoned our claim to superpowerdom.
According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Energy,
the United States is importing 12-14 million barrels of oil per day.
At a current price of about $115 per barrel, that's $1.5 billion per
day, or $548 billion per year. This represents the single largest
contribution to America's balance-of-payments deficit, and is a
leading cause for the dollar's ongoing drop in value. If oil prices
rise any higher -- in response, perhaps, to a new crisis in the Middle
East (as might be occasioned by U.S. air strikes on Iran) -- our
annual import bill could quickly approach three-quarters of a trillion
dollars or more per year.
While our economy is being depleted of these funds, at a moment
when credit is scarce and economic growth has screeched to a halt, the
oil regimes on which we depend for our daily fix are depositing their
mountains of accumulating petrodollars in "sovereign wealth
funds" (SWFs) -- state-controlled investment accounts that buy up
prized foreign assets in order to secure non-oil-dependent sources of
wealth. At present, these funds are already believed to hold in excess
of several trillion dollars; the richest, the Abu Dhabi Investment
Authority (ADIA), alone holds $875 billion.
The ADIA first made headlines in November 2007 when it acquired a
$7.5 billion stake in Citigroup, America's largest bank holding
company. The fund has also made substantial investments in Advanced
Micro Systems, a major chip maker, and the Carlyle Group, the private
equity giant. Another big SWF, the Kuwait Investment Authority, also
acquired a multibillion-dollar stake in Citigroup, along with a $6.6
billion chunk of Merrill Lynch. And these are but the first of a
series of major SWF moves that will be aimed at acquiring stakes in
top American banks and corporations.
The managers of these funds naturally insist that they have no
intention of using their ownership of prime American properties to
influence U.S. policy. In time, however, a transfer of economic power
of this magnitude cannot help but translate into a transfer of
political power as well. Indeed, this prospect has already stirred
deep misgivings in Congress. "In the short run, that they [the Middle
Eastern SWFs] are investing here is good," Senator Evan Bayh (D-
Indiana) recently observed. "But in the long run it is unsustainable.
Our power and authority is eroding because of the amounts we are
sending abroad for energy=85."
No Summer Tax Holiday for the Pentagon
Foreign ownership of key nodes of our economy is only one sign of
fading American superpower status. Oil's impact on the military is
another.
Every day, the average G.I. in Iraq uses approximately 27 gallons
of petroleum-based fuels. With some 160,000 American troops in Iraq,
that amounts to 4.37 million gallons in daily oil usage, including
gasoline for vans and light vehicles, diesel for trucks and armored
vehicles, and aviation fuel for helicopters, drones, and fixed-wing
aircraft. With U.S. forces paying, as of late April, an average of
$3.23 per gallon for these fuels, the Pentagon is already spending
approximately $14 million per day on oil ($98 million per week, $5.1
billion per year) to stay in Iraq. Meanwhile, our Iraqi allies, who
are expected to receive a windfall of $70 billion this year from the
rising price of their oil exports, charge their citizens $1.36 per
gallon for gasoline.
When questioned about why Iraqis are paying almost a third less
for oil than American forces in their country, senior Iraqi government
officials scoff at any suggestion of impropriety. "America has hardly
even begun to repay its debt to Iraq," said Abdul Basit, the head of
Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi
governmental expenditures. "This is an immoral request because we
didn't ask them to come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we
didn't have all these needs."
Needless to say, this is not exactly the way grateful clients are
supposed to address superpower patrons. "It's totally unacceptable to
me that we are spending tens of billions of dollars on rebuilding Iraq
while they are putting tens of billions of dollars in banks around the
world from oil revenues," said Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan),
chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "It doesn't compute as far
as I'm concerned."
Certainly, however, our allies in the region, especially the Sunni
kingdoms of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
that presumably look to Washington to stabilize Iraq and curb the
growing power of Shiite Iran, are willing to help the Pentagon out by
supplying U.S. troops with free or deeply-discounted petroleum. No
such luck. Except for some partially subsidized oil supplied by
Kuwait, all oil-producing U.S. allies in the region charge us the
market rate for petroleum. Take that as a striking reflection of how
little credence even countries whose ruling elites have traditionally
looked to the U.S. for protection now attach to our supposed
superpower status.
Think of this as a strikingly clear-eyed assessment of American
power. As far as they're concerned, we're now just another of those
hopeless oil addicts driving a monster gas-guzzler up to the pump --
and they're perfectly happy to collect our cash which they can then
use to cherry-pick our prime assets. So expect no summer tax holidays
for the Pentagon, not in the Middle East, anyway.
Worse yet, the U.S. military will need even more oil for the
future wars on which the Pentagon is now doing the planning. In this
way, the U.S. experience in Iraq has especially worrisome
implications. Under the military "transformation" initiated by
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, the future U.S. war
machine will rely less on "boots on the ground" and ever more on
technology. But technology entails an ever-greater requirement for
oil, as the newer weapons sought by Rumsfeld (and now Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates) all consume many times more fuel than those they
will replace. To put this in perspective: The average G.I in Iraq now
uses about seven times as much oil per day as G.I.s did in the first
Gulf War less than two decades ago. And every sign indicates that the
same ratio of increase will apply to coming conflicts; that the daily
cost of fighting will skyrocket; and that the Pentagon's capacity to
shoulder multiple foreign military burdens will unravel. Thus are
superpowers undone.
Russia's Gusher
If anything demonstrates the critical role of oil in determining
the fate of superpowers in the current milieu, it is the spectacular
reemergence of Russia as a Great Power on the basis of its superior
energy balance. Once derided as the humiliated, enfeebled loser in the
U.S.-Soviet rivalry, Russia is again a force to be reckoned with in
world affairs. It possesses the fastest-growing economy among the G-8
group of major industrial powers, is the world's second leading
producer of oil (after Saudi Arabia), and is its top producer of
natural gas. Because it produces far more energy than it consumes,
Russia exports a substantial portion of its oil and gas to neighboring
countries, making it the only Great Power not dependent on other
states for its energy needs.
As Russia has become an energy-exporting state, it has moved from
the list of has-beens to the front rank of major players. When
President Bush first occupied the White House, in February 2001, one
of his highest priorities was to downgrade U.S. ties with Russia and
annul the various arms-control agreements that had been forged between
the two countries by his predecessors, agreements that explicitly
conferred equal status on the USA and the USSR.
As an indication of how contemptuously the Bush team viewed Russia
at that time, Condoleezza Rice, while still an adviser to the Bush
presidential campaign, wrote, in the January/February 2000 issue of
the influential Foreign Affairs, "U.S. policy=85 must recognize that
American security is threatened less by Russia's strength than by its
weakness and incoherence." Under such circumstances, she continued,
there was no need to preserve obsolete relics of the dual superpower
past like the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; rather, the focus
of U.S. efforts should be on preventing the further erosion of Russian
nuclear safeguards and the potential escape of nuclear materials.
In line with this outlook, President Bush believed that he could
convert an impoverished and compliant Russia into a major source of
oil and natural gas for the United States -- with American energy
companies running the show. This was the evident aim of the U.S.-
Russian "energy dialogue" announced by Bush and Russian President
Vladimir Putin in May 2002. But if Bush thought Russia was prepared to
turn into a northern version of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela
prior to the arrival of Hugo Ch=E1vez, he was to be sorely disappointed.
Putin never permitted American firms to acquire substantial energy
assets in Russia. Instead, he presided over a major recentralization
of state control when it came to the country's most valuable oil and
gas reserves, putting most of them in the hands of Gazprom, the state-
controlled natural gas behemoth.
Once in control of these assets, moreover, Putin has used his
renascent energy power to exert influence over states that were once
part of the former Soviet Union, as well as those in Western Europe
that rely on Russian oil and gas for a substantial share of their
energy needs. In the most extreme case, Moscow turned off the flow of
natural gas to Ukraine on January 1, 2006, in the midst of an
especially cold winter, in what was said to be a dispute over pricing
but was widely viewed as punishment for Ukraine's political drift
westwards. (The gas was turned back on four days later when Ukraine
agreed to pay a higher price and offered other concessions.) Gazprom
has threatened similar action in disputes with Armenia, Belarus, and
Georgia -- in each case forcing those former Soviet SSRs to back down.
When it comes to the U.S.-Russian relationship, just how much the
balance of power has shifted was evident at the NATO summit at
Bucharest in early April. There, President Bush asked that Georgia and
Ukraine both be approved for eventual membership in the alliance, only
to find top U.S. allies (and Russian energy users) France and Germany
blocking the measure out of concern for straining ties with Russia.
"It was a remarkable rejection of American policy in an alliance
normally dominated by Washington," Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee
Myers of the New York Times reported, "and it sent a confusing signal
to Russia, one that some countries considered close to appeasement of
Moscow."
For Russian officials, however, the restoration of their country's
great power status is not the product of deceit or bullying, but a
natural consequence of being the world's leading energy provider. No
one is more aware of this than Dmitri Medvedev, the former Chairman of
Gazprom and new Russian president. "The attitude toward Russia in the
world is different now," he declared on December 11, 2007. "We are not
being lectured like schoolchildren; we are respected and we are
deferred to. Russia has reclaimed its proper place in the world
community. Russia has become a different country, stronger and more
prosperous."
The same, of course, can be said about the United States -- in
reverse. As a result of our addiction to increasingly costly imported
oil, we have become a different country, weaker and less prosperous.
Whether we know it or not, the energy Berlin Wall has already fallen
and the United States is an ex-superpower-in-the-making.
by Michael Klare
Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies
at Hampshire College and author of the just-released Rising Powers,
Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).
A documentary film based on his previous book, Blood and Oil, is
available from the Media Education Foundation and can be ordered at
bloodandoilmovie.com. A brief video of Klare discussing key subjects
in his new book can be viewed by clicking here.
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