All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Michael T.
Clair.
He is a five colleges professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire college.
He's a defense correspondent for the nation magazine, and he's the author of the race for what's left the global scramble for the world's last resources.
He's got this great piece at Tom dispatch, which we must already run at anti-war.com or maybe tomorrow or something.
I miss it.
Anyway, it'll probably be there.
Everything by Tom is, and many things by Michael Claire appeared there before in the past for sure.
But otherwise it's at Tom dispatch.com.
It's called the Cheney effect in the Obama administration.
Welcome back to the show.
It's been a long time.
How are you doing?
All right, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a very impressive article.
Um, you just do such a great job of explaining the Cheney doctrine, uh, as it pertains to, uh, divvying up the world's energy resources, uh, by the divvying done by Washington DC, of course.
And, um, then how that agenda has been adopted by the Obama administration.
So, uh, we got two 10 minute segments, so you can take your time.
Like you to really just go ahead and lay it out for people.
Let them imagine their map of Eurasia and tell them what in the heck is going on here.
What is it all about after all?
Well, you know, I, I believe that Cheney more than anybody else in Washington during the Bush administration was the master architect of the American foreign policy, and he saw everything, I believe, through the lens of oil, that we are engaged in a global struggle for oil, that oil will eventually run out and that whoever controlled the world's flow of oil would control the world's economy and therefore control the world.
And he was determined that it would be the United States and nobody else.
And he would be, he was prepared to take any risks necessary to, to accomplish that, like go to war in the Middle East to control the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.
And I think he made that the centerpiece of American foreign policy.
It led to the first Iran war with Iraq, I'm sorry, in, in the first Gulf War.
And it led to the invasion of Iraq.
And I think it's pushing us now under Obama in the direction of a war with Iran.
And I, I think this all goes back to this notion that control of the oil flow is the, the, the, the geopolitical essence of American foreign policy as seen by Cheney, and I think has now been picked up by Obama.
So that's, that's the one aspect of this.
Other, other key aspect is control of the sea lanes in Asia so that you, you have a vice over the flow of raw materials into China and Japan and our competitors there and their ability to export by control of the seas.
And this is hardly a new concept.
It was developed in the 1890s by America's greatest naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was head of the U.S.
Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and laid the basis for the Spanish-American war, the acquisition by the U.S. of the Philippines and Puerto Rico and, and Guantanamo Bay and all of that.
So the control of the seas is not a new concept, but it's, it's now main focus is on Asia and especially China.
So those are two parts of what I lay out in this piece.
Why don't, why don't, why don't we talk about the implications of all this?
Sure.
Well, actually, could you give just a word to about the importance of the Caspian Sea Basin, because this is a place where people's eyes are either going to glaze over or they're going to be, you know, kind of intrigued that what's going on over here between some of these seas.
And we don't really know all that well, if we live in Texas, but that are extremely important, especially of course, in terms of America's relationship with Russia, Russia's with the world.
Okay.
Well, to be honest with you, I couldn't have found the Caspian Sea on a map 10, 15 years ago, when I first got into the study of oil geopolitics, because now if you, if you do follow this, you have to know exactly where it is and what are the countries around it and their history and so on.
A Caspian Sea is, is a landless body of water.
It has no outlet to the greater seas.
And it's fed by the Volga River in Russia, but like the Dead Sea, it doesn't go anywhere else.
So you can't use it to ship oil or gas out of that area.
And there is a lot of oil and gas in that area.
And Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan all have shores on the Caspian Sea, but you can't put it on a tanker and sail it anywhere.
So you have to build pipelines.
So all of this becomes the geopolitics of pipelines.
And the easiest way to get oil or gas out of there is to ship it through Iran to the Persian Gulf and put it on tankers or ship it through pipelines running through Russia.
And we have a pipeline system and send it to Europe that way.
But it's been the policy first under Cheney to ensure that that oil and gas bypasses Iran and Russia and flows through countries that the U.S. is linked to, namely Azerbaijan and Georgia.
So the U.S. has been promoting the construction of pipelines for oil and gas through Georgia and Azerbaijan and Turkey, bypassing both Iran and Russia.
And this has made us a geopolitical player in this area that was once part of the Soviet Union.
And of course, you know, it's like saying if, you know, Mexico and Texas, I'm sorry, New Mexico and Texas and California were detached from the United States somehow.
And Russia was playing power politics in our former territories.
That's the way the Russians see this.
And so naturally, they find they're very resentful of this, not to mention the loss of revenue.
So this has become a hotbed of conflict.
And now Mr. Obama is stepping into it by continuing this policy of promoting oil and gas exports from the Caspian Sea through Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Now, I'm not sure we really don't have time before the break, Michael, but could you just address very quickly whether, in fact, the average guy who needs to fill his truck with gas so that he can get to work, so that he can provide for his family, is dependent on this kind of policy or not?
I hate to be that cynical, but that's really what it comes down to is Americans are willing to kill people if it means this is what it takes for me to be able to get to work.
And it seems to me like it's totally unnecessary and superfluous and it's only good for airplane salesmen and and think tank goons and stuff like that.
But otherwise, it's all wash.
But what do you think about that?
Well, the fact of the matter is that the United States is the biggest petroleum guzzler in the world.
We use about one fourth of the world's oil every day and we don't produce enough of it at home to satisfy our needs.
So we have to get oil from other parts of the world.
But even if we could get more of our oil from home, you still don't need this policy of being the guardian of the Persian Gulf.
That's not about getting oil for Americans.
That's what I have to be very clear about.
It's not to get oil for your Texas truck driver.
That's to have a form of veto power over the politics of what happens in Asia.
This is big power politics.
It's the equivalent of nuclear blackmail, except oil economic blackmail.
And that has nothing to do with the needs of American car drivers.
Right.
And, you know, I hate to say it, but just regular decent people, this is how they rationalize the policy because the government, come on, it is we the people, it can't be that bad.
So it must just be necessary for us to live the way we live.
That's what they say.
But they're just wrong.
Hang on.
We'll be right back with Michael T.
Clare, the race for what's left after this.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Michael T.
Clare.
Professor and author of the race for what's left, the global scramble for the world's last resources.
Actually, let me start right there.
Where are you on this whole peak oil thing?
Because for me, whatever people believe to me doesn't seem like it's probably right.
But what's your take on all that?
How quickly are we running out of oil for the world's economy at a decent price?
OK, well, you have to divide oil into two categories.
Liquid oil, which I call oil one, that's mainly run out.
Then you have a lot of crud oil.
You could call it oil, too, which is like tar sands, Venezuelan heavy oil, Arctic oil, tar, shale oil, all kinds of stuff that doesn't come out of the ground by itself, but has to be liquefied in the ground or, you know, chipped out of the ground by force through hydrofracking.
Now, there's a lot of that stuff left.
So it depends how much damage you want to do to the planet, to the Earth, to get this crud oil out of the ground.
But there's admittedly there's quite a bit of that left.
But the easy oil, black oil, black liquid oil, that's mainly gone.
Mainly gone.
Well, the easy stuff from now on, each barrel is going to be much harder to get.
OK, and then so again, back to the imperialism of all this, of course, it's easy to see that, you know, Dick Cheney went and got hired by Halliburton, the oil services company, and he got them a lot of jobs building military bases near and in all these oil lands and that kind of thing.
Plenty of contractor jobs for them.
And of course, James Baker at Baker Botts, those guys are the lawyers for every oil company in the world, right?
So there's got to be, I don't know, what percentage of just Houston's manipulation for their own benefit is at stake here versus just guys with shiny ribbons at the Pentagon who have their dreams of hegemony and being able to pinch off supplies to China in the event of an emergency weakening Russia's influence in Europe, etc.
You know, I take a different view.
I don't think the military is behind all of this.
They do what the civilian bosses tell them to do, by and large.
And I think the oil companies would be happy to go anywhere in the world to make a profit.
I think this comes, this strategy, this oil geopolitics, a lot of it comes from think tanks and conservative think tanks and even liberal centrist think tanks from the foreign policy establishment in Washington.
If you spend any time there, you understand that there's a consensus among Democrats and Republicans that the United States has to be the dominant world power forever, that we've been ordained by the Almighty to play this role.
And that requires the use of force whenever necessary to achieve that.
I'm not saying I believe that or that your listeners believe that.
I'm just saying that is the prevailing view among foreign policy aristocrats in Washington, and they see oil as a key factor to make that all possible.
So going to war over oil is crucial to that strategy.
Right.
But in a sense, I mean, aren't they just the sock puppets of the moneyed interests that fund their think tanks?
And aren't those usually the military industrial complex and the oil companies?
Well, now you have a point there.
Yes, that's true.
But the geopolitical thinking comes from the hired intellectuals who devise these strategies.
Yeah, well, no doubt they think they're smart.
Can you tell us about Obama's turn to Africa?
Is this what Cheney wanted to dominate in Somalia and Libya and Uganda, Nigeria?
Now, I think this is a more recent development, but certainly Cheney could have felt the same way.
I don't have any familiarity with his Cheney's views, but the blueprint that he wrote, the National Energy Policy of 2001, does say that we should get more of our oil from Africa.
And it was during the Bush administration that the Africa Command, AFRICOM, was established.
And if anything, Obama has given more support, more enthusiasm for the expansion of AFRICOM.
So there's certainly no difference of opinion there.
Yeah, well, and, you know, it seems like the veneer of fighting terrorism is getting really thin covering this policy.
You know, we're going around now.
Boko Haram's a big threat.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia is a big threat.
The terrorists in Libya are a big threat.
But who made them?
It was us.
Well, now, you have to distinguish.
There's a whole range of opposition out there.
There are, you know, religious fanatics who see the U.S. as the root of all evil for all kinds of reasons.
Then you have local warlords in various places who, you know, who are essentially mafia kingpins who are in it for their own wealth.
And a lot of places in Africa, you have that phenomenon in the Middle East.
Some of them are called kings or presidents, but they're mainly mafia bosses.
Yeah, kleptocrats.
That's all.
Exactly.
And the United States has supported a lot of those kleptocrats for quite some time when it was to our advantage.
But sometimes it's to their advantage to rebel against us.
So there's a whole mosaic of different motives underway in these areas.
Right.
Well, and like I was trying to get at there a little bit was an unending list of excuses.
As you say, if you stop and discriminate about who's who here, whether somebody, maybe somebody in Libya is a threat.
We just fought a war for those guys or whether some local rebel group in Nigeria is a threat.
These questions have to be followed up on.
You don't just take a press release's word for it and expand and let that be good enough.
That seems to be where we are now, where, you know, just the other day they announced Boko Haram is on the terrorist list.
Well, so what does that mean for the future of our policy in Nigeria?
Nothing good.
Well, I would say nothing good in the sense that this will probably lead to deeper U.S. involvement in Nigeria.
And I think that would be a dangerous mistake, given the size of Nigeria and the degree of internecine warfare.
Boko Haram has some ideology of, you know, anti-Western thought, and it does engage in violent acts, but it's partly some of the support for it is people who think the government is corrupt.
And there's certainly a lot of evidence to support that notion.
So if we came on the side of the government, it's going to only feed anti-government and anti-American hostility.
So this, as you say, Scott, there's a real danger in getting involved in these disputes.
Now, I'm trying to picture, I'm sorry, I don't have the map in front of me.
I'm trying to remember exactly, you know, whether, you know, which routes around exist and that kind of thing.
But how much of the regime change effort going on in Syria right now is tied up in this same oil dominance policy?
You know, my sense is it's part of a larger picture of the historic struggle among the great powers that began long before the United States got involved in the area.
Syria was originally fought, it was once part of the Ottoman Empire.
And then during World War I, France and Britain fought over Syria because they both thought it had a lot of oil, and they wanted, each wanted to control Syria.
And in the end, Britain got Iraq, and France got Syria.
The people in the area weren't much involved in that decision-making process, needless to say.
But I'm not an expert on this.
All I'm saying is that there are factional differences and ethnic and religious differences there that most of us know very little about.
I certainly don't know very much about it.
And for the U.S. to get deeply involved in Syria would be like getting deeply involved in Iraq.
When we went in there, we were told, you know, this was a case of the people against Saddam Hussein, and we didn't know anything about the divisions between the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds.
And Syria will be even worse.
And each country in the area is going to try to take advantage of that.
So certainly the United States would like to see its allies prevail in this contest, but we certainly would be unwise to heat this fight up.
All right, everybody, that is Michael T.
Clare.
He's a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a regular at TomDispatch.com, and he's the author of The Race for What's Left, The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources.
Thanks so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Sure thing.
