October 2008
What we have today, folks, is a super-power with a super-hernia
RUSSIA AND CHINA SHOW AMERICA
THE TRUE COST OF OIL by Dennis Peacocke
Russia and China have introduced America and the world to the true cost of oil. It isn’t $125.00 a barrel or even $150.00 a barrel. No, no. It is much, much more expensive than that. All you have to do is ask the citizens of the nation of Georgia or those of Darfur. They will tell you that the true price of oil is blood, political freedom, and measured capitulation.
How different the world is today than the one we experienced in the early 1990s. It is so sad that the “good old days” didn’t work out the way we thought they should. Back then it seemed so clear. The Soviet Union had collapsed; leaving the United States the world’s only super power. If they needed help the U.S. business world would invest in them which would be a double-win for us. It would bring in lots of money to U.S. business markets and would further intertwine Russia’s economic future with the U.S., so as to ensure no further major tensions or “cold wars.” Russia was economically decimated and our involvement with them would likely create a kind of “grateful dependence” from them towards us – a beneficent “big brother” to them, demonstrating to the world how generous we were after all the challenges they gave us for the last fifty years. Besides that their rich resources of oil and gas would make both Europe and the U.S. less energy dependent on the Middle East nations with their Muslim-terrorist complications.
As for China, they were offering us a vast potential future consumer market for U.S. goods and services, plus they could be a labor-cheap source of component manufacturing for us to decrease off-shore production costs and increase net profits by lowering input costs. Another clear “win-win” was presenting itself. Obviously not much deep thinking went into the whole Russia-China strategic planning scenarios, as least that was publicly discussed. How could it all go so wrong?
China has ended up creating a massive balance-of-payments problem for the U.S. as a result of their incredible production of a vast array of low-cost products geared for western markets. Beyond that, they have also become our money-supplier by financing significant amounts of our war-on-terror budget deficits; thus potentially compromising our “independence factors” in decision-making vis-à-vis China relationships even further. Even more problematically, their thirst for energy and oil has turned them into a potential “enemy” of U.S. interests in Africa, the Middle East, and Russia. China’s oil interests in the Sudan are the number one reason the genocide in Darfur has not been halted and resolved. Add to this the likely resumption of the historical China-Russia
alliances, this time over Russia’s energy resources rather than the common ideological bonds of Marxism, and one doesn’t have to be too bright to see where this could go.
Now the Russians invade Georgia and make threatening sounds towards former Eastern-European satellite nations, knowing that Europe has no military “guts” and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have contained U.S. ground forces’ capabilities globally to a condition of impotence. Add to that Europe’s massive dependence on Russian energy supplies and my, my, my how the tables have turned! What we have today, folks, is a super-power with a super-hernia. But be of good courage; both Presidential candidates have assured us that they know what to do. Of course this level of problem-analysis won’t come up in the election debates, so that means that effectively these problems don’t exist. So let us go back to sleep, America, and let’s all feel good about ourselves, because that really does seem to be our national ...
the bottom line.
