The attached column by Pat Buchanan could not be more spot on. It slices through the misbegotten assumption that Saudi Arabia is our ally and that the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, Spokane WA and Springfield MA have anything to do with the religious and political machinations of Riyadh and its conflicts with Iran and the rest of the Shiite world.
Nor is this only a recent development. In fact, for more than four decades Washington’s middle eastern policy has been dead wrong and increasingly counter- productive and destructive. The crisis provoked this past weekend by the 30-year old hot-headed Saudi prince, who is son of the King and heir to the throne, only clarified what has long been true.
That is, Washington’s Mideast policy is predicated on the assumption that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is deployment of the Fifth Fleet to the Persian Gulf. And that an associated alliance with one of the most corrupt, despotic, avaricious and benighted tyrannies in the modern world is the lynch pin to regional stability and US national security.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The House of Saud is a scourge on mankind that would have been eliminated decades ago, save for Imperial Washington’s deplorable coddling and massive transfer of arms and political support.
At the same time, the answer to high oil prices is high oil prices. Could anything not be more obvious than today when crude oil is hovering around $35 per barrel notwithstanding a near state of war in the Persian Gulf?
Here’s the thing. The planet was endowed by the geologic ages with a massive trove of stored energy in the form of buried hydrocarbons; and it is showered daily by even more energy in the form of the solar, tidal and wind systems which shroud the earth.
The only issue is price, the shape and slope of the supply curve and the rate at which technological progress and human ingenuity drives down the real cost of extraction and conversion.
On top of that, the vast resilient forces of the free market have silently, steadily and dramatically improved the energy efficiency of the US economy.
As shown in the long term chart below, energy consumption per dollar of GDP is only about 40% of the level which obtained when Washington’s politicians first started running around like Chicken Little, claiming that the energy sky was falling at the time of the so-called 1973 oil crisis.
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