Barnett - The best time to reform the Middle East is before the "oil collapse" begins
¦"The Battle of the Pump," op-ed by Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 7 October 2004, p. A31.
¦"Some Big Winners From Costly Oil: Surging Prices Bring Boom Times to the Persian Gulf States," by Michelle Wallin, New York Times, 7 October 2004, p. W1.
I know Friedman loves to equate America's lifestyle with implicitly supporting (and funding) global terrorism, but frankly I think this sort of shaming tactic is a loser. When we overly protect our ag industry with government money, we certainly screw over Gap states struggling to move beyond agriculture and up the production ladder. But drawing a firm line between those subsidies and 9/11 gets to be awfully galling.
Here, Friedman basically argues that if you drive a gas guzzler, you've paying for terrorism around the world, quoting some nimrod energy consultant on the subject. Frankly, I find that argument rather stretched and weak. We need to move progressively down the carbon chain toward hydrogen for a lot of reasons, but getting back at those "damn Muslims" should be one of them.
We need to bring the Middle East into the global economy at a pace their cultures can stand. It's true that our transactions with that region have been amazingly narrow for the past several decades, but that's the fault of the leadership in those countries, not our use of oil. The Middle East regimes have had plenty of time and funds to do better by their people, and they've chosen not to, so trying to lay that guilt back on the American public is just plain wrong.
Friedman's real purpose here is to say, Let's force oil-rich Arab regimes to reform pronto by lowering the price of oil in the global marketplace and devastating their incomes! That'll force the change we want really fast!
Now, you might wonder why I would support a Big Bang strategy of generating a System Perturbation on the Middle East by topping Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq but I wouldn't want to do the same to them economically as quickly as possible.
Here's why: America is a very rich country. We might get off oil quickly at relatively high cost while not suffering too bad as an economy, but the rest of the world can't follow that lead easily, so they'd be left on oil for far longer. What would happen once the Old Core moved rapidly off oil? Prices would fall and you'd see a lot of marginal production sites around the world (more in the Core than in the Gap) shut down immediately, because it wouldn't be worth pumping that oil anymore. In the end, the countries with the easily accessible and known reserves would still be the Persian Gulf states, who would get by in a reduced profit-margin situation simply by constricting their exports and scoring the best possible prices with those parts of the global economy who couldn't transition at the same speed—like most of the New Core but especially Developing Asia. In the end, the West's rapid disengagement from the Middle East would push that region into long-term alliance with Asia, which I imagine would only be too happy to get all the oil it needs at a reduced price and without any need to rely on U.S. military power to keep it stable.
Meanwhile, once the U.S. got off oil and soon after got out of the Middle East militarily, either the repressive regimes there would survive by defeating the terrorists and keeping the corrupt influences of the West at bay, or the terrorists would find the regimes far easier pickings given the lack of outside military support. In short, I don't think this is a good strategic vision.
They say the time to find a job is when you have a job. I would add that the time to reform a political system is before the revolution becomes a foregone conclusion. Yes, you take out the really bad guys who are a major threat to their own people and their neighbors, but states that are just repressive you'd rather see move in the direction of reforms under pressure, but not extreme duress, which is what a return to $10-a-barrel oil would be.
What we need to be doing right now is encouraging Gulf states to use this breathing space and additional money to start building modern economies right now. By and large, they all know what they're up against, so now's the time to make our case for change as strongly as possible without being overtly threatening. We've already stirred the pot sufficiently with the Iraq takedown. Now it's time to let the Big Bang work itself out some before we bite off anymore than we can otherwise chew—much less swallow.
Again, I want hybrids and fuel cells, and I want our government to support those trends as they emerge and become economically feasible and desired. And I want that to be sooner rather than later. But I don’t advocate this approach to "free" America from its "dependence" on the Middle East, nor to punish regimes there. I want a Middle East that feels confident enough in wanting to join the world that it progressively opens up its societies and political systems by first opening up its economies and networks of communication and content-flows. I think that progressive growth in connectivity is the answer, not attempts to firewall America off from this "evil situation." To me, that's playing into Osama's offer of civilizational apartheid, and it'll get too many people hurt in the process.
The Arab's realize the opportunity they now enjoy. As one professor of economics at Qatar said: "We are undergoing a prosperous period of the business cycle. We have to learn how to prolong that prosperity and lay down the seeds of a good economy."
We want that to happen, because that's how the Middle East will join the Core, and that's how we'll extinguish the terrorism that's rooted there.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
