All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Michael T. Clare again.
And of course, he is a regular at tomdispatch.com and therefore at antiwar.com as well.
He is the Five College Professor Emeritus of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College.
What a cool title for a job to have.
And he is Senior Visiting Fellow at the Arms Control Association, which I just interviewed a guy from, Kingston Reef, a moment ago about the treaties and so forth.
He is the author, get this guys, of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose, The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change.
That's an interesting one.
All right.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you, sir?
Always a pleasure to be with you, Scott.
Very happy to speak to you again.
And I should mention that your previous book and one that you're known for, I think, is because it's such a catchy title, The Race for What's Left, about all those public-private partnerships around the world seeking to secure resources with violent force.
Always good stuff and I think the basis of most all of your analysis.
You know what?
Now that I think about it, I want to ask you about something that's not in this article first.
And that is something that I actually was way overdoing the story about how we got into Iraq War II in a book I was writing, and so I threw out the last year's worth of work.
But one of the things that I got hung up on for weeks was researching about writings in The Wall Street Journal and by you and an interview by you of Robert Dreyfus, a couple of different ones and some different statements.
And this is something that we've talked about in the past as well.
Leon Hadar has written about this for the Cato Institute.
And that was the idea that Iraq War II, as far as securing those oil resources, was not really so much about even hooking up Houston, Texas oil companies as much as, you know, of course, they did get their favors.
But and we're just leaving out the Israel part of it, but just as far as the oil interests are involved in the Iraq War, that more than anything, it's a military interest in just cornering the physical control of those resources in the event of a crisis or in case of a crisis with China.
So that back then, the dawn of this century, really building America's defenses and all this PNAC stuff, they're real worried about the rise of China.
And they said, we want to be able to keep them out of Africa, keep them out of the Middle East and make sure they're starving for oil if we ever have to fight them.
But then there's really not too many good sources on that.
And so I was wondering if you could just spill your guts and tell us everything you know and think about that for us for a minute here.
Well, you know, my source for this is Dick Cheney, because he spoke repeatedly about the need to control the flow of Persian Gulf oil for geopolitical purposes.
And no, for me, it's geopolitics.
And geopolitics is where economics and military power come together.
And I'm a firm believer that you could explain just about everything in human history as geopolitics.
Like I say, where economics and military power merge.
And the geo there meaning the geography of where those economic resources are located.
Right.
Precisely.
Precisely.
And not only where they're located, but often the key supply routes and the choke points that control them.
And in the Persian Gulf area, it's the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point where the Persian Gulf empties out into the Indian Ocean and something like one third of the daily supply of tradable oil every day passes through that narrow passageway.
And for people like Dick Cheney, controlling the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz and the flow of oil through that narrow passageway meant controlling the world economy because you had your hand on the jugular, as he would put it, you know.
So it's a combination of geography and economics together that was what motivated Cheney and I think the United States in these Iraq wars.
You know, look back through history, look at the British Empire.
What were the points that they fought for Singapore, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, places that you know, today, many of them matter so much that the Strait of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, the South China Sea itself, we talk about today.
These are points that are crucial, not for their resources themselves, but because so much of the world's flow, trade of critical resources pass.
So if you can control those key passageways, those choke points, you can control the world's economy or at least that's the way geopoliticians think about things.
You know, I bet you that I focus too much on searching the neoconservative saying that.
Because I guess I could swear I remember Richard Perle speaking that way as well.
But I wonder if maybe I just needed to refine my search better and focus on Cheney's statements.
And I know it's 20 years later.
So I apologize for putting you on the spot.
Do you happen to remember a specific speech that he gave or a specific meet the press interview or whatever it was where he explained this in those terms?
He certainly spoke about this.
I could pretty much remember the date.
It's it's September 11th, and it would be 1990, September 11th, 1990, his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
And that's the day of Bush senior's big New World Order speech before the Congress.
Was it?
This was when this is after just a few weeks after.
Let me see if my brain is still functioning correctly.
After Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Yes.
Yes.
This would be five weeks later.
Yes.to testify as secretary of defense, why the U.S. is sending troops to the Persian Gulf.
And he laid out this very thorough geopolitical explanation going back to FDR and his FDR meeting with Abdelaziz Ibn Saud on the USS Quincy on February 14th, 1945, at the end of World War Two, when the U.S. forged a partnership with the Saudis that more or less continues to this day and which the U.S. has pledged to defend the Saudi kingdom in return for a privileged position within Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabian oil.
And he begins there, Cheney, and you could go back to his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 11th, 1990.
Very good.
Ask the man for a 20-year-old footnote.
He gives you a 30-year-old footnote off the top of his head.
Great stuff.
Well, this one sticks out in my head.
Yeah.
Well, I bet you 11 years later, you thought, ain't that funny about the way things work.
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So how dependent on oil, on Middle Eastern oil, imported oil, is China?
100% or only 98% or what?
Well, very high percentage.
Now, this is one of China's biggest vulnerabilities.
It's Achilles heel.
China is becoming more and more an oil importing country and it's finding itself in the same trap that the US became entrapped in of dependence.
You become dependent on foreign oil.
You then get stuck.
You get trapped in the politics and the divisions and the wars of the countries you're reliant on.
We got stuck in the wars in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and all of that.
And we're still stuck in those wars.
And now China is finding itself in the same trap.
It's becoming closer to Saudi Arabia, to Iran, but also to Africa.
Africa is trying to diversify its supplies by becoming more reliant on oil from Angola, for example, and other African countries, and also from Venezuela.
And no good could come from any of this.
And the Chinese are aware of it and they understand that they're in this terrible trap of oil dependency and they haven't been able to extricate themselves.
And we've discovered how hard that is.
We still have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq because of our horrible dependence on imported oil.
And now China's getting involved in the same thing.
Well, I mean, but America still has Texas and we're in all the shale and the Dakotas and this and that makes us energy exporters now.
And so even if we believe them that we needed military force to secure those resources for import before, which I don't believe, again, I think it makes a lot more sense that it's for trying to withhold it from others than guaranteeing that we can get it because in a state of peace, you know, high oil prices mean new discoveries and productions and then lower oil prices as the next step, kind of no matter what.
But now that we are, essentially we could be an autarky in terms of energy consumption, it seems like that excuse is all the way dead by now, but no?
Well, not exactly.
But I think you're quite right that part of the motivation for continued U.S. military involvement in the Middle East is to ensure, you know, as Cheney said, we have to keep our hands on the jugular if not for ourself, then because think of all the power that gives us over others like China.
And exactly right, as you put it.
But there's another factor, which is the global price of oil.
Even if we're self-sufficient, Scott, but the global supply of oil contracts for everybody else, our oil prices are set by the world price, not a domestic price.
And if there's a global oil shortage, then our prices are going to rise and our economy would tank as a consequence as well.
So it turns out that we have a vested interest in keeping the global supply abundant.
And you could see President Obama spoke to that in one of his U.N.
General Assembly speeches.
He said, we're not going to leave the Middle East because we have a vested interest in keeping the world supply of the Middle Eastern supply of oil flowing for other people so that the price remains stable.
And to keep the political status quo, right?
So the Japanese don't start cutting their own deals with the Iranians behind our back and stuff like that.
And stuff like that.
Sure.
But basically to keep the world's economy afloat.
Now this was pretty cold.
You know, so and you and I have talked about this before, and I know you have a very sophisticated understanding of all of these things.
But you know, one thing that David Stockman has always said, the former Reagan budget official, the good one who resigned over the budget, that he just says, look man, the only solution to high oil prices is high oil prices.
Welcome to market economics.
It's fine.
Prices go up.
We have a big spike.
Some chic, you know, has a bad dream.
And so he decides to stop exporting oil for a year.
So we'll find, you know, prices will rise and then that'll be new incentive for business to discover and develop new resources.
And the prices go right back down again.
Same with any other thing.
And that, you know, the way he puts it, because he's so caustic, it's just you'd have to be from Washington, D.C. to believe that you need a politician to help the oil industry bring oil to market.
You just don't need them.
They can do it just fine themselves.
I think this was one, a way of thinking pre-COVID.
Now we have to rethink all of this.
And I can't say that I know what the outcome is going to be in the long run.
Now we have a new problem.
The problem is that with the world's economy so shattered by the coronavirus, that the demand for oil has plummeted.
This is unprecedented and unanticipated.
And as a result, the price has gone down so low that a lot of those oil producers you spoke about in Texas, in the Permian Basin, are no longer able to make ends meet, to make a profit.
And so we're shuttering their fields and going bankrupt.
So you could have the opposite.
You could have a crisis of surplus demand and low prices and the collapse of the global oil industry, something never, I certainly never anticipated that.
Yeah.
But you know, I mean, I think that that's a great example too, right?
Because so here's a black swan thing, some stupid virus comes and turns the world upside down for a minute.
But who could determine what Texas oil companies could and should invest in, in terms of developing Texas oil, gas, shale, whatever resources that they have, other than them?
And based on what other question other than prices?
I mean, at some point they're going to be able to bounce back.
But could you imagine if it was like the Trump administration or Biden administration program to help remake the Texas oil industry for them or some kind of thing?
That would be totally unnecessary, right?
They'll do what they can with the prices they have.
We can count on that, right?
I'm with you there.
The big question in my mind is whether, you know, the global oil, whether oil is ever going to come back to the scale that we once anticipated.
Forces are stepping in, that renewable forms of energy are becoming hyper competitive in generating electricity anyway, with fossil fuels.
And if electric cars start becoming competitive, they're not there yet.
But if they were to become competitive with oil driven cars, then the demand for oil pretty much vanishes.
They're not there yet.
So now, in your article, you talk all about the vision, as they would call it, I guess, of the Army and the Marines and the Air Force as they go forward into the brave new world here where it's, you know, the war on terrorism era is not over yet.
But they are looking at their great power competition and they are looking at developing all their new technologies and cashing all those checks.
And so they have, you know, new doctrines.
They have their air-sea battle and they have their, you know, new plans for how to fight war with Russia and Eastern Europe and all these different things.
Can you talk about some of that?
Yes.
So we're changing the subject here a little bit.
I've been writing in the past year or so about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics and how they're changing the nature of war and especially the introduction of robotics into warfare.
And for the military, this U.S. military, this looks very promising, especially in a post-COVID era when you're going to be sending your troops, your human troops in large numbers to places around the world where they could be infected or they could infect others or where they're just going to be packed together in large numbers and infect each other, like on ships.
And so you see a acceleration of the robotization of the U.S. military in the air, on the ground and on ships.
And now are we talking about soon enough Star Wars type battle droids as in, you know, infantry or or, you know, patrol type soldiers in occupations?
All of this is under development.
It's probably the place where you're seeing it fastest and not surprising given what's happened in the past few months in the Navy.
Where is the greatest risk of sailors, of combatants getting infected?
It's on a ship because people are in such close proximity to each other.
And probably remember what happened on the Theodore Roosevelt carrier where like a third of the crew came down with COVID in April, March, and they had to bring the ship out of service and bring it to Guam and take the entire crew had to be evacuated.
And so the Navy is now planning a future Navy made up of unmanned vessels, unmanned surface ships and unmanned submarines.
No sailors.
Imagine that.
Just send out ships that are self-controlled.
Why have sailors?
You can make the ships smaller and cheaper.
I've heard proposals like that, that are only like one third satirical, that let's just build robot ships and have them fight each other in the middle of the Pacific and sink each other all day long.
And it doesn't ever really make any difference.
And all the military contractors get their money, but they don't ever have to really kill anybody.
All the goofballs get to see the big explosions on TV, which are fun.
And then, and the government can continue their make work program for the military industrial complex that never goes away.
Only instead of killing Afghan peasants from now on, let me just kill expensive boats.
There is some of that, although what I think is driving this, Scott, is the asymmetrical nature of a conflict with China in the Pacific, because we're not fighting from our shore.
We're not fighting Chinese ships out in the Pacific off of Los Angeles.
We're fighting China from our ships off their shores.
And so they could fire at our ships with missiles and planes from their own territory.
And of course, they can pile on thousands of missiles at our aircraft carriers.
And so our aircraft carriers and other surface ships have become very vulnerable the closer you get to the Chinese border, as you would expect.
And so that's very risky for our Navy.
So they think the only way to get ships close to Chinese territory in a future war and not worry about losing a ship with thousands of crew members on board as if they're unmanned, as they say.
Amazing.
I'm so sorry that you have to go right now because this is so much fun.
This would obviously be a new Dr. Strangelove type satirical sort of a movie if someone out, some aspiring screenwriter wants to get to it.
This is your guy, Michael T. Clair.
Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate that a lot.
Sure, Scott.
If we could talk about it in the future, I'm happy to.
Okay, great.
Well, you keep writing articles and I'll keep interviewing you about them, sir.
Okay.
You take care.
Thanks a lot.
You too.
All right, you guys.
That is Michael T. Clair, again, writing for TomDispatch.com, a world of killer robots, but not national security.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
