An interesting hypothesis from Chris Sanders of Sanders Research. The
US has chosen to address the problem that it does not make enough of
what the rest of the world wants by going to war to monopolize control
of the supply and distribution of what the world needs, petroleum.
There are other war aims, of course, but control of the global
hydrocarbon net is certainly the most important. One may believe
otherwise, but then one may believe in magic and the tooth fairy too.
The truth is that the dangerously destabilizing idea has rooted in
Washington that, in the words of Vice President Cheney, “deficits don't
matter (we proved that in the 90s).” He is right of course in pure
power terms; a fuller expression of Cheney's dictum might well add, “as
long as we are able to force everyone else to accept them (deficits).”
This is interesting because it recognizes that the US is one of many
participants in a highly competitive network of global markets (an
invention that helped us win the cold war). Within this context, we
aren't doing that well (some would say we are losing badly). One of the
factors that hinders us from robust competitiveness is our defense
burden — our excess burden is the equivalent of our yearly government
deficits. So the question becomes: how do you finance these defense
expenditures? Sanders concludes that the Bush solution has been to
become the world's oil policeman (oil is increasingly being produced in
unstable geographies). He posits that this lets us run deficits that
the world is loathe to avoid funding. [John Robb's Weblog]