GEOPOLITICS
& RISK
You have been elected President of the United States and were sworn in yesterday. Reporting for duty early is Colin Powell who strides into the Oval Office where he has been frequently before. What do you say? (Powell, having been a bureaucrat as well as a general, has a world map with him which is quite helpful to see where all these different places are, at least in relation to each other. You decide to color the world’s regions according to their diplomatic problem level.) All Europe, Central and South America, Australia and Africa should be marked as No Problem regions. No country in those regions is a military threat to the United States. Russia is deemed a continuing opportunity for Westernization and economic development but not a military threat. It can barely pay its way in the world. Its nukes, though dangerous, are daily less deadly. Mark it as an unlikely military problem; co-opt it by economic cooperation, deals and buy a lot of its oil. China? We don’t depend on China for anything. Nothing China offers the United States is strategically critical to the American way of life. Containment and commercial cooperation is the ticket. China will eventually convert from Communism to some sort of free country like the Russians did back in the late ‘80s. Mark China as an unlikely military threat. It has everything to lose and nothing to gain. Those old mandarins may not be Republicans but they are neither stupid nor ignorant. What’s left? The Middle East. As Tony would say, the bloody Middle East. Well, they’re not bothering us; oil is cheap enough and the Israelis can take care of themselves with some money and military help from us. Mark it as not a problem; none of those countries is likely to start a war against us. Okay, Mr. Secretary; keep a lid on things around the world. I’m going do what a compassionate conservative is supposed to do: Cut taxes for the rich and let the rising tide lift all the boats. See you later, Colin. It is September 12, 2001. Colin Powell strides into the Oval Office. What do you say? You are either with us or you are with the terrorists. It is June 6, 2003. Colin Powell strides into the Oval Office. What do you say? Risk. Life is filled with it. So too with politics, diplomacy and the interactions of nations, reflecting, as they do, the lengthened shadows of their leaders. Indeed, the risks are almost always the same though the actors are not. In everyday life, we take personal risks: marriage, for example, is a personal risk. We take economic risks every day whenever we buy or sell a good or service. With countries, as with people, risks taken, if lost, have consequences which are manageable even when not desirable. But not always. Today, much of the world is at risk in a high stakes contest between us and our allies against the Arab/Muslim world. For good or ill, we have put up our chips and are playing this high risk game. We have decided that there exists a “clash of civilizations” between modern Western values and medieval Arab/Muslims values; between open, free, Western nations and closed, tyrannical Arab-Muslim nations. For some Western-value nations, e.g., Israel, the risk is heavy loss of life and fortune. For the United States, the risk of life is high relative to our prior loss experiences. It is not generally thought that America’s risk is great. I disagree. Depending upon when the game is won, American cities and people are surely at risk from terrorist attacks of hideous and multiple kinds. Nevertheless, the risk is worth the candle, considering the alternative, surely the greater risk, that of having Western society overthrown, overrun or overburdened with alien people, ideas and cultures. Those scenarios are not peaceful evolution but, rather, frightful revolution. Skirmishes, such as 9-11, are the tip of what could easily become commonplace violence, leading to civil wars and a diminution of Western individual freedoms sugar-coated as necessary to curb or counter revolutionary forces. That is a common shibboleth used by the powerful to initially enslave a nation and its people. Yes, we are protected by the Constitution but it has been abridged before. It is difficult to argue that oil is not a value in the strategic equation; it is. The West demands the energy produced in the main through oil. Without energy, Western economies shrivel. Note that when the price per barrel of crude rises to $40 or more, Wall Street’s indices head sharply South. This is an historic truth. As the Iraqi battle, not war, battle, wound down, the price of oil dropped, the Dow continued its pre-battle, anticipatory rise based on its expectation of lower oil prices from an increase in supply as the Iraqi fields again flow. Such additional supply at the margin always signals price drops in commodities. For Wall Street, it meant both inflation and energy costs under control. Equity prices thus head North. In addition to long-term economic dependence on oil, there is the principle that free nations do not wage military war against one another. We have accepted that principle as true. Hence, the simplistic syllogism: Free nations do not wage war on other free-nations. X is a free-nation. X will not wage war against the United States, Great Britain or other free nations. Simplistic does not mean dumb. There are, as Ronald Reagan famously said, simple answers. There are just not easy answers. So then, the battle for Iraq was about oil and destabilizing the Middle-East. Horrors to your State Department people who are always against “destabilization”. Put another way: If destabilization means to upset the apple-cart, then stabilization must mean maintaining the status quo. Whether one is to be preferred over the other is factually dependent. The facts about Iraq were well assessed. It had a truly despicable, easy to demonize tyrant at its head. He deserved what he got. It is an historically secular country compared to, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. It has immense reserves of oil, established production facilities and is geographically, smack-dab in the middle of the Arab/Muslim world. Old Rummy did it right. It was practically perfect. We are going to dump the Saudis militarily, moving our forces into Iraq which will become one big U.S. forces basing country. The Iraqis will love it after a while; they won’t want us to leave. After all, with us there, they don’t need a military. Nobody’s going to attack them. And look where we are: Iraq touches Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Syria and Jordan. And Afghanistan sits on Iran’s other, Eastern border so those guys are in a pincer from the start should they get too smart. We can destabilize each of those Arab/Muslim states by our sheer physical presence. We may not have to do much but just be there. I hope so. We need to be there too. I keep calling it the Battle of Iraq because we’re in a war with the Arab/Muslim ideologues; Iraq was the second battle of that war, Afghanistan the first. Our next target is going to be those Palestinians as we’ve got to get that problem fixed. Without that fixed, it is tougher to sell other Arab/Muslim countries on Western values, freedom or anything but hatred of Jews. But we can’t be unrealistic. Fixing the Palestinian-Israeli matter may not be possible without civil war among Palestinians or military war with the Israelis. So we have to look like we’re working that problem while, at the same time, we try to destabilize Iran and Saudi Arabia. Destabilize means to set them on the road to freedom. Without those two dictatorships supplying the money and Muslim moral authority, pipsqueak places like Jordan, Egypt and Syria will dry up and shut up. Anyway Colin that’s the plan. It’s January 21, 2005. The new president was sworn in yesterday. Colin Powell strides into the Oval Office. What will you have to say? |