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The US and Eurasia:
End game for the industrial era?
by Richard Heinberg
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With the dawn of the 21st century the world has entered a new stage of
geopolitical struggle.
The first half of the 20th century can be understood as one long war between
Britain (and shifting allies) and Germany (and shifting allies) for European
supremacy. The second half of the century was dominated by a Cold War
between the US, which emerged as the world's foremost industrial-military
power following World War II, and the Soviet Union and its bloc of
protectorates. The US wars in Afghanistan (in 2001-2002) and Iraq (which,
counting economic sanctions and periodic bombings, has continued from 1990
to the present) have ushered in the latest stage, which promises to be the
final geopolitical struggle of the industrial period-a struggle for the
control of Eurasia and its energy resources.
My purpose here is to sketch the general outlines of this culminating
chapter of history as it is currently being played out.
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First, it is necessary to discuss geopolitics in general, and from a
historical perspective, in relation to resources, geography, military
technology, national currencies, and the psychology of its practitioners.
The Ends and Means of Geopolitics
It is never enough to say that geopolitics is about "power," "control," or
"hegemony" in the abstract. These words have usefulness only in relation to
specific objectives and means: Power over what or whom, exerted by what
methods? The answers will differ somewhat in each situation; however, most
strategic objectives and means tend to have some characteristics in common.
Like other organisms, humans are subject to the perpetual ecological
constraints of population pressure and resource depletion. While it may be
simplistic to say that all conflicts between societies are motivated by the
desire to overcome ecological constraints, most certainly are. Wars are
typically fought over resources-land, forests, waterways, minerals, and
(during the past century) oil. People do occasionally fight over ideologies
and religions. But even then resource rivalries are seldom far from the
surface. Thus attempts to explain geopolitics without reference to resources
(a recent example is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations) are
either misguided or deliberately misleading.
The industrial era differs from previous periods of human history in the
large-scale harnessing of energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas, and
uranium) for the purposes of production and transportation-and for the
deeper purpose of expanding the human carrying capacity of our terrestrial
environment. All of the scientific achievements, the political
consolidations, and the immense population increases of the past two
centuries are predictable effects of the growing, coordinated use of energy
resources. In the early decades of the 20th century, petroleum emerged as
the most important energy resource because of its cheapness and convenience
of use. The industrial world is now overwhelmingly dependent on oil for
agriculture and transportation.
Modern global geopolitics, because it implies worldwide transportation and
communication systems rooted in fossil energy resources, is therefore a
phenomenon unique to the industrial era.
The control of resources is largely a matter of geography, and secondarily a
matter of military technology and control over currencies of exchange. The
US and Russia were both geographically blessed, being self-sufficient in
energy resources during the first half of the century. Germany and Japan
failed to attain regional hegemony largely because they lacked sufficient
indigenous energy resources and because they failed to gain and keep access
to resources elsewhere (via the USSR on one hand and the Dutch East Indies
on the other).
Yet while both the US and Russia were well endowed by nature, both have
passed their petroleum production peaks (which occurred in 1970 and 1987,
respectively). Russia remains a net oil exporter because its consumption
levels are low, but the US is increasingly dependent on imports of both oil
and natural gas.
Both nations long ago began investing much of their energy-based wealth in
the production of fuel-fed arms systems with which to expand and defend
their resource interests globally. In other words, both decided decades ago
to be geopolitical players, or contenders for global hegemony.
Roughly three-quarters of the world's crucial remaining petroleum reserves
lie within the borders of predominantly Muslim nations of the Middle East
and Central Asia-nations that, for historical, geographic, and political
reasons, were unable to develop large-scale industrial-military economies of
their own and that have, throughout the past century, mainly served as pawns
of the Great Powers (Britain, the US, and the former USSR). In recent
decades, these predominantly Muslim oil-rich nations have pooled their
interests in a cartel, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC).
While resources, geography, and military technology are essential to
geopolitics, they are not sufficient without a financial means to dominate
the terms of international trade. Hegemony has had a financial as well as a
military component ever since the adoption of money by Bronze Age
agricultural empires; money, after all, is a claim upon resources, and the
ability to control the currency of exchange can effect a subtle ongoing
transfer of real wealth. Whoever issues a currency-especially a fiat
currency, i.e., one not backed by precious metals-has power over it: every
transaction becomes a subsidy to the money coiner or printer.
During the colonial era, rivalries between the Spanish real, the French
franc, and the British pound were as decisive as military battles in
determining hegemonic power. For the past half-century, the US dollar has
been the international currency of account for nearly all nations, and it is
the currency with which all oil-importing nations must pay for their fuel.
This is an arrangement that has worked to the advantage both of OPEC, which
maintains a stable customer in the US (the world's largest petroleum
consumer and a military power capable of defending the Arab oil kingdoms),
and of the US itself, which receives a subtle financial tithe for every
barrel of oil consumed by every other importing nation.
These are some of the essential facts to bear in mind when examining the
current geopolitical landscape.
The Psychology and Sociology of Geopolitics
Geopolitical goals are pursued within specific environments, and they are
pursued by specific actors-by particular human beings with identifiable
social, cultural, and psychological characteristics.
These actors are, to a certain extent, embodiments of their society as a
whole, seeking benefits for that society in competition or cooperation with
other societies. However, such powerful individuals are inevitably drawn
from a particular social class within their society-typically the wealthy,
owning class-and tend to act in such a way as to benefit that class
preferentially, even if doing so means ignoring the interests of the rest of
society. Moreover, individual geopolitical actors are also unique human
beings with insights, prejudices, and religious obsessions that may
occasionally lead them to act at cross-purposes not only to their society,
but their class as well.
From society's point of view, geopolitics is a Darwinian collective struggle
for increased carrying capacity; but from the individual geostrategist's
viewpoint, it is a game. Indeed, geopolitics could be considered the
ultimate human game-one with immense consequences, and one that can only be
played within a tiny club of elites.
As long as there have been civilizations and empires, kings and emperors
have played some version of this game. The game attracts a patricular kind
of personality, and it fosters a certain way of thinking and feeling about
the world and about other human beings. The act of playing the game confers
feelings of immense superiority, aloofness, power, and importance. One can
begin to appreciate the supremely addictive intoxication that flows from
playing the geopolitical game by reading documents composed by prominent
geostrategists-national security briefing papers by people like George
Kennan and Richard Perle, or books by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Take, for example, this passage from Kennan's US State
Department Policy Planning Study #23, from 1948:
We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its
population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to
devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position
of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality... we
should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards
and democratization.
Such dry, functional prose is at home in a world of offices, telephones, and
limousines, but that is a world utterly disengaged from the millions-perhaps
hundreds of millions or billions-of people whose lives will be
overwhelmingly impacted by a phrase here, a word there. At one level, the
geostrategist is simply a man (after all, the club is overwhelmingly a men's
club) doing his job, and trying to do it competently in the eyes of
onlookers. But what a job it is!-determining the course of history, shaping
the fates of nations. The geostrategist is a Superman, an Olympian disguised
as a mortal, a Titan in a business suit. Nice work if you can get it.
Eurasia-Grand Prize of the Great Game
Looking at their maps and model globes, British geostrategists of the 18th
and 19th centuries could not help but notice that Earth's landmasses are
highly asymmetrical; Eurasia is by far the largest of the continents.
Clearly, if they were themselves to build and maintain a truly
globe-spanning empire, it would be essential for the British first to
establish and defend strategic footholds throughout this mineral-rich,
densely populated, and history-soaked continent.
But British geostrategists knew perfectly well that Britain itself is only
an island off the northwest coast of Eurasia. Within this largest of
continents, the most extensive nation was by far Russia, which
geographically dominated Eurasia as Eurasia dominated the globe. Thus the
British knew that their attempts to control Eurasia would inevitably
confront the self-preservative instincts of the Russian Empire. Throughout
the 19th century and into the early 20th, British/Russian conflicts
repeatedly flared on the Indian frontier, notably in Afghanistan. An
imperial functionary named Sir John Kaye called this the "Great Game," a
term immortalized by Kipling in Kim.
Two costly World Wars and a century of colonial uprisings largely cured
Britain of her imperial obsessions, but Eurasia could not help but remain
central to any serious plan for world domination.
Thus in 1997, in his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security
Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter and geostrategist par excellence, would
insist that Eurasia must be at the center of future efforts by the United
States to project its own power globally.
"For America,"
he wrote, "the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a
millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who
fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global
power. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia-and America's
global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its
preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." [1]
Eurasia is pivotal, according to Brzezinski, because it "accounts for about
60 percent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known
energy resources." In addition, it contains three-quarters of the world's
population, "all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers and all but one
of the covert ones." [2]
In Brzezinski's view, just as the US needs the rest of the world for markets
and resources, Eurasia needs American dominance for stability.
Unfortunately, however, the American people are not accustomed to imperial
responsibilities: "[T]he pursuit of power is not a goal that commands
popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the
public's sense of domestic well-being." [3]
Something fundamental shifted in the world of geopolitics with the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001-which clearly presented a "sudden threat . . .
to the public's sense of domestic well-being." This shift was felt again
with the new American administration's determination-voiced with increasing
insistence through 2002 and the first weeks of 2003-to invade Iraq. These
geostrategic shifts seemed centered in a new American attitude toward
Eurasia.
At the end of WWII, when the US and the USSR emerged as the word's dominant
powers, the US had established permanent bases in Germany, Japan, and South
Korea, all to hedge in the Soviet Union. America even waged a failed and
extremely costly war in Southeast Asia to gain yet another vector of
Eurasian containment.
When the USSR collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, the US appeared free
to dominate Eurasia, and thus the world, more completely than had any other
nation in world history. The decade that followed was one characterized
primarily by globalization-the consolidation of corporatized economic power
centered largely in the US. It appeared that US hegemony would be maintained
economically rather than militarily. Brzezinski's book conveys the spirit of
those times, advocating the maintenance and consolidation of America's ties
to long-time allies (Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea) and the
coddling or co-opting of the new independent states of the former Soviet
Union.
In contrast with this prescription, the new administration of George W. Bush
appeared to be taking a more strident tack-one that took old allies for
granted in its unabashed unilateralism. In his shredding of international
environmental, human rights, and weapons-control agreements; in his pursuit
of a doctrine of preemptive military action; and especially in his seemingly
inexplicable obsession with the invasion of Iraq, Bush was expending
enormous political and diplomatic capital, needlessly creating enemies even
among trusted allies. His rationale for war-the elimination of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction-was patently silly, since the US had supplied
many of those weapons and Iraq posed no current threat to anyone; moreover,
a new Gulf war risked destabilizing the entire Middle East. [4] What could
possibly justify such a risk? What was motivating this bizarre new change in
strategy?
Again, some background discussion is necessary before we can answer this
question.
The US: Colossus Astride the Globe
At the dawn of the new millennium the US had the world's most advanced
military technology and the world's strongest currency. Throughout the 20th
century, America had patiently built its empire, first in Central and South
America, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and then (following World
War II) through alliances and protectorates in Europe, Japan, Korea, and the
Middle East. Its army and intelligence agency were active in virtually every
country in the world, while its immense powers seemed tempered by its
ostensible advocacy of democracy and human rights.
In the 1980s, the US government came under the control of a group of
neo-conservative strategists surrounding Ronald Reagan and George Herbert
Walker Bush. For years, these strategists worked to destroy the USSR (which
they succeeded in doing by undermining the Soviet economy) and to
consolidate power in Central America and the Middle East. The latter project
culminated in the first US-Iraq war of 1990-1991. Their publicly stated goal
was nothing less than world domination.
While the Clinton-Gore administration emphasized multilateral cooperation,
its push for corporate globalization-which ruthlessly transferred wealth
from poor nations to rich ones-was essentially an extension of Reagan-Bush
policies. However, the neo-conservatives fumed at their exclusion from the
direct reins of power. They regarded themselves as the country's rightful
leadership, and saw Clinton and his followers as usurpers. When the Supreme
Court appointed George W. Bush as president in 2000, the neo-conservatives
returned with a vengeance. With the assistance of the fawning media,
Bush-the pampered son of a wealthy and deeply politically connected East
Coast family that had made its money from banking, weapons, and oil-managed
to portray himself as a down-home Texas "man of the people." He immediately
surrounded himself with the group of geopolitical strategists-Donald
Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle-who had developed
international policy for the first Bush administration.
In his recent article "The Push for War," international affairs analyst
Anatol Lieven traced the roots of the far-right strategic agenda to a
lingering Cold War mentality, Christian fundamentalism, increasingly
divisive domestic politics, and an unquestioning support for Israel. The
basic goal of total military domination of the globe, Lieven wrote, was
shared by Colin Powell and the rest of the security establishment. It was,
after all, Powell who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in
1992 that the US requires sufficient power "to deter any challenger from
ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage." However, the idea of
preemptive defense, now official doctrine, takes this a leap further, much
further than Powell would wish to go. In principle, it can be used to
justify the destruction of any other state if it even seems that that state
might in future be able to challenge the US. When these ideas were first
aired by Paul Wolfowitz and others after the end of the Cold War, they met
with general criticism, even from conservatives. Today, thanks to the
ascendancy of the radical nationalists in the administration and the effect
of the 11 September attacks on the American psyche, they have a major
influence on US policy. [5]
Whether or not the administration in some way orchestrated the events of
9/11-as has been suggested by several commentators including Gore Vidal-it
was clearly poised to take advantage of them [6]. Bush immediately
proclaimed to the world that "You are either with us, or you are with the
terrorists."
With a bloated military budget, a cowed and obedient corporate media
establishment, and a public frightened into willingly giving up basic
constitutional protections, the neo-conservatives appeared to have won full
control of the nation and to have become masters of its global empire. But
even as their victory seemed complete, rumors of dissent began swirling.
Insubordination in the Ranks
Popular resistance to corporate globalization started to materialize in the
late 1990s, first coalescing in the anti-WTO mass demonstration in Seattle
in November 1999. Thenceforth, the anti-globalization movement appeared to
grow with each passing year, morphing into a global antiwar movement in
response to US plans to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq.
But discontent with US domination of the globe was not confined to leftists
in street demonstrations brandishing giant puppets. As American military
bases sprang up in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in Central Asia in the
aftermath of the Afghanistan campaign, geostrategists in Russia, China,
Japan, and Western Europe began examining their options. Only Britain seemed
steadfast in its alliance with the American colossus.
One seemingly inoffensive response to US global hegemony was the effort of
11 European nations to establish a common currency-the euro. When the euro
debuted at the turn of the millennium, many predicted that it would be
unable to compete with the dollar. Indeed, for months the euro's comparative
value languished. However, it soon stabilized and began to rise.
A more worrying development, from Washington's perspective, was the
increasing tendency of second- and third-tier nations to overtly abandon the
neoliberal economic policies at the heart of the project of globalization,
as new governments in Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador publicly broke with the
World Bank and declared their desire for independence from American
financial control.
Meanwhile, in Russia political theorist Alexander Dugin was gaining
increasing influence with anti-American geostrategic writings. In 1997, the
same year Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard appeared, Dugin published his
own manifesto, The Basics of Geopolitics, advocating a reconstituted Russian
Empire composed of a continental bloc of states allied to cleanse the
Eurasian land-mass of US influence. At the center of this bloc Dugin posited
a "Eurasian axis" of Russia, Germany, Iran, and Japan.
While Dugin's ideas were banned during Soviet times for their echoes of Nazi
pan-Eurasian fantasies, they gradually gained influence among post-Soviet
Russian officials. For example, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
recently decried the "strengthening tendency towards the formation of a
unipolar world under financial and military domination by the United States"
and called for a "multipolar world order," while emphasizing Russia's
"geopolitical position as the largest Eurasian state." Russia's Communist
Party has adopted Dugin's ideas in its platform; Gennady Zyuganov, Communist
Party chairman, even published his own primer on geopolitics, titled
Geography of Victory. Though Dugin remains a marginal figure
internationally, his ideas cannot help but resonate in a country and
continent increasingly hemmed in and manipulated by a powerful and arrogant
hegemonic nation on the other side of the globe.
Outwardly, Russia-like Germany, France, Japan, and China-still usually
defers to the US. Even dissent from the Bush buildup to war on Iraq has
remained fairly muted.
But in private, leaders in all of these countries are no doubt making new
plans. Few would yet go so far as to agree with Alexander Dugin's view that
Eurasia will come to dominate the US, not the other way around. Yet in just
three years, many Eurasian leaders' attitudes toward American hegemony have
shifted from quiet acceptance to biting criticism to a serious examination
of the alternatives.
The American Dilemma
Dugin and other Eurasian critics of US power begin from a premise that would
seem ludicrous to most Americans. To Dugin, the US is acting not out of
strength, but of weakness.
America has for many years sustained an overwhelmingly negative balance of
trade-which it can afford only because of the strong dollar, in turn enabled
by the cooperation of OPEC in denominating oil exports in dollars. America's
trade balance is negative partly because its indigenous production of oil
and natural gas has peaked and the nation now relies increasingly on
imports. Also, most US corporations have shifted their manufacturing
operations overseas. A further systemic weakness comes from widespread
corporate corruption-revealed most glaringly in the collapse of Enron-and
the close ties between corporations and the US political establishment.
Bubble after bubble-high-tech, telecom, derivatives, real estate-has either
already burst or is about to.
Next to the strong dollar, the other pillar of American geopolitical
strength is its military. But even in this case there are cracks in the
facade. No one doubts that the US possesses weapons of mass destruction
sufficient to wipe out the world many times over. But America actually uses
its weaponry increasingly for the purpose of what French historian Emmanuel
Todd has called "theatrical militarism." In an essay titled "The US and
Eurasia: Theatrical Militarism," journalist Pepe Escobar notes that this
strategy implies that Washington " . . . should never come up with a
definitive solution for any geopolitical problem, because instability is the
only thing that would justify military action ad infinitum by the only
superpower, anytime, anywhere. . . . Washington knows it is unable to
confront the real players in the world-Europe, Russia, Japan, China. Thus it
seeks to remain politically on top by bullying minor players like the Axis
of Evil, or even more minor players like Cuba." [7]
Thus American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously reveal both the
sophistication of US military technology and the inherent frailties of the
US geopolitical position.
Theatrical militarism has the dual purpose of projecting the image of
American invincibility and might while maintaining or extending US military
domination over resource-rich third-tier nations. This largely explains the
recent Afghanistan invasion and the impending attack on Baghdad. The
strategy suggests that terrorist acts against the US should be covertly
encouraged as a justification for more domestic repression and foreign
military adventures.
Yet we have not fully answered the question posed earlier-why is the current
administration willing to expend so much domestic and international
political capital in order to pursue the impending Iraq war? Critics of the
administration insist that this is a war for oil profits, but the situation
is actually more complicated and can be understood only in the light of two
crucial factors not widely acknowledged.
The first is that the continued strength of the dollar is in question. In
November 2000, Iraq announced that it would cease to accept dollars for its
oil, and would accept instead only euros. At the time, financial analysts
suggested that Iraq would lose tens of millions of dollars in value because
of this currency switch; in fact, over the following two years, Iraq made
millions. Other oil-exporting nations, including Iran and Venezuela, have
stated that they are contemplating a similar move. If OPEC as a whole were
to switch from dollars to euros, the consequences to the US economy would be
catastrophic. Investment money would flee the country, real estate values
would plummet, and Americans would shortly find themselves living in Third
World conditions. [8]
Currently, if any country wishes to obtain dollars with which to buy oil, it
can do so only by selling its goods or resources to the US, taking out a
loan from a US bank (or the World Bank-functionally the same thing), or
trading its currency on the open market and thus devaluing it. The US is in
effect importing goods and services virtually for free, its massive trade
deficit representing a huge interest-free loan from the rest of the world.
If the dollar were to cease being the world's reserve currency, all of that
would change overnight.
A New York Times article dated 31 January, 2003, titled "For Flashier
Russians, Euro Outshines the Dollar," noted that "Russians are believed to
have hoarded as much as $50 billion in American dollars in coffee cans and
under mattresses, the largest such stash of any nation on earth." But
Russians are quietly exchanging their dollars for euros, and high-ticket
items like cars now carry price tags in euros. Further, "Russia's central
bank said today that it had increased its euro holdings in the last year to
10 percent of its foreign reserves, up from 5 percent, while the dollar's
share had dropped from 90 percent to 75 percent, reflecting the low return
on dollar investments." [9]
Ironically, even the European Union is concerned about this trend, because
if the dollar sinks too low then European firms will see their US
investments lose value. Nevertheless, as the EU grows (it is slated to add
10 new members in 2004), its economic clout is increasingly perceived as
inevitably surpassing that of the US.
For US geostrategists, the prevention of an OPEC switch from dollars to
euros must therefore seem paramount. An invasion and occupation of Iraq
would effectively give the US a voting seat in OPEC while placing new
American bases within hours' striking distance of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and
several other key OPEC countries.
The second factor likely weighing on Bush's decision to invade Iraq is the
depletion of US energy resources and the consequently increasing American
dependency on oil imports. The oil production of all non-OPEC countries,
taken together, probably peaked in 2002. From now on, OPEC will have ever
more economic power in the world. Moreover, global oil production will
probably peak within a few years. As I have discussed elsewhere,
alternatives to fossil fuels have not been developed sufficiently to permit
a coordinated process of substitution once oil and natural gas grow scarce.
The implications-especially for major consumer nations such as the US-will
eventually be ruinous. [10]
Both problems are of overwhelming urgency. Bush's Iraq strategy is
apparently an offensive one designed to enlarge the US empire, but in
reality it is primarily defensive in character since its deeper purpose is
to forestall an economic cataclysm.
It is the two factors of dollar hegemony and oil depletion-even more than
the hubris of the neo-conservative strategists in Washington-that are
prompting an overall de-emphasis of long-standing alliances with Europe,
Japan, and South Korea; and the increasing deployment of US troops in the
Middle East and Central Asia.
While no one is talking about it openly, top echelons in the governments of
Russia, China, Britain, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and other countries
are keenly aware of these factors-hence the shifting alliances, the veto
threats, and the backroom negotiations leading up to the US invasion of
Iraq.
But the war, though by now inevitable, remains a highly risky gamble. Even
if it ends in days or weeks with a decisive American victory, we will not
know for some time whether that gamble has paid off.
Who Will Control Eurasia?
As I write this, the US is drawing up plans to bomb Baghdad, a city of 5
million people, and to pour in twice as many cruise missiles during the
first two days of the assault as were used in the entirety of the first Gulf
War. Depleted uranium shells and bullets will again be employed, leaving
much of Iraq a radioactive wasteland and condemning future generations of
Iraqis (and American soldiers and their families) to birth defects,
sickness, and early deaths. It is difficult to imagine that the spectacle of
so much unprovoked death and destruction could help but inspire thoughts of
revenge in the hearts of millions of Arabs and Muslims.
American geopolitical strategists will call the effort a success if the war
ends quickly, if production from Iraqi oil fields is soon ramped up, and if
other OPEC nations are bullied into maintaining the dollar as their currency
of account. But this operation (one cannot really call it a war), undertaken
as an act of economic desperation, can only temporarily stem a rising tide.
What are the long-term consequences for the US and Eurasia? Many are
unpredictable. Forces are being unleashed now that may be difficult to
contain.
The more reliably foreseeable long-term trends are not favorable. Resource
depletion and population pressure have always been predictors of war. China,
with a population of 1.2 billion, will soon be the world's largest consumer
of resources. In times of plenty, this nation can be viewed as immense
opening market: there are already more refrigerators, mobile phones, and
televisions in China than in the US. China does not wish to challenge the US
militarily and recently gained trade privileges by quietly backing American
military operations in Central Asia. But as oil-the basis for the entire
industrial system-grows scarcer and its reserves more hotly disputed, China
cannot be expected to remain docile.
North Korea, a Chinese quasi-ally, was being quietly defanged through
negotiations during the Clinton era, but is now chafing at being labeled by
Bush as part of an "axis of evil" and at having crucial energy-resource
imports embargoed by the US. Out of desperation, it is trying to get
Washington's attention by reviving its nuclear weapons programs. Meanwhile,
the new South Korean government is utterly opposed to US unilateralism and
wants to negotiate with the North. The US is threatening to destroy North
Korea's nuclear facilities with air strikes, but to do so would raise a
deadly nuclear cloud over all of northeast Asia.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan also have interests that will likely
eventually diverge from those of the US. These neighbor nations are, of
course, nuclear powers and sworn enemies with longstanding border disputes.
Pakistan, currently a US ally, is also a significant supplier of nuclear
materials to North Korea, and has offered aid to the Taliban and al
Qaida-facts that underscore just how convoluted and counterproductive
Washington's strategy has lately become.
The Americans' worst nightmare would be a strategic and economic alliance
among Europe, Russia, China, and OPEC. Such an alliance possesses an
inherent logic from the viewpoint of each of the potential participants. If
the US were to try to prevent such an alliance by playing the only strong
card still in its hand-its weaponry of mass destruction-then the Great Game
could end in ultimate tragedy.
Even in the best case, petroleum resources are limited and, as they
gradually run out over the next few decades, will be unable to support the
further industrialization of China or the maintenance of industrial
infrastructure in Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea, or the US.
Who will rule Eurasia? In the end, no single power will be capable of doing
so, because the energy-resource base will be insufficient to support a
continent-wide system of transportation, communication, and control. Thus
Russian geopolitical fantasies are as vain as those of the US. For the next
half-century there will be just enough energy resources left to enable
either a horrific and futile contest for the remaining spoils, or a heroic
cooperative effort toward radical conservation and transition to a
post-fossil-fuel energy regime.
The next century will see the end of global geopolitics, one way or another.
If our descendants are fortunate, the ultimate outcome will be a world of
modest, bioregionally organized communities living on received solar energy.
Local rivalries will continue, as they have throughout human history, but
never again will the hubris of geopolitical strategists threaten billions
with extinction.
That's if all goes well and everyone acts rationally.
- – Richard Heinberg - New College of California (Santa Rosa)
Richard Heinberg, a journalist and educator, is a member of the core faculty
of New College of California in Santa Rosa, where he teaches a program on
Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community. He writes and publishes the
monthly MuseLetter. He has his own wesite, at MuseLetter.
This article is adapted from The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, (New Society Publishers, 2003).
Notes:
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its
Geopolitical Imperatives, (Basic Books, 1997), p. 30
- Ibid., p. 31
- Ibid., p. 36
- See Richard Heinberg, "Behold Caesar", MuseLetter #128, October 2002
- Anatol Lieven, "The Push for War", London Review of Books, December 30, 2002
- See Gore Vidal, "The Enemy Within," and the Center for Cooperative
Research
- Pepe Escobar, "Us and Eurasia: Theatrical Militarism," Asia Times Online, December 4, 2002
- See "Behind the Invasion of Iraq"; "Protest by switching oil trade from dollar to euro," Oil and Gas Journal, April 15, 2002; W. Clark, "The Real but Unspoken Reasons for the Upcoming Iraq War."
- See Michael Wines, "For Flashier Russians, Euro Outshines the Dollar," New York Times, January 31, 2003
- Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, (New Society, 2003)
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