Hydrocarbon Hegemony, Petro-Mercantilism, and Global Energy Access:

The three alternatives in the growing struggle for scarce resources

It is fashionable in some quarters to question the motives American foreign policy regardless of which party or what president is in power, and it had become especially fashionable to question the motives of the “neo-con” Bush Administration, even after most of the few actual neo-cons who were ever there had left the White House. The hidden assumption behind all this questioning is that, but for America’s greedy and nefarious motives, the international scene would be one of peace and harmony, or at the very least much more nearly so.

This is, of course, nonsense. US policy does not exist in a vacuum. Standing against US interests and motives are those of other nations. A genuine sceptic and thoughtful critic would examine the likely situation should those other nations’ preferences come to dominate the field. This is not very difficult to do. There are a limited number of actors who would fill the space left by the absence of US policy, and it is easy to compare their actions and goals to those of the United States.

Let us begin by assuming the “silver bullet” that critics on the left and right believe would allow the United States to largely disengage from global politics: Energy Independence.

Reducing our dependence on energy from odious regimes would matter not a whit, because oil is fungible and we will be held hostage to energy prices no matter where we get it.  Our chief sources already are

• domestic
• Canada
• Mexico.

The cost of all that oil – regardless of the source – will go up whenever the global cost rises and falls.

The way to control those future shocks is to engage globally, not to disengage and try to hide behind an isolationist wall (and a false one, at that) of energy independence.

I’m a geographer, and the geographer’s perspective is usually left out of geopolitical discourse that has come to be dominated by the political half of the word.  But, geography is fundamental and the most unchangeable aspect of geopolitics, and we ignore it at our peril.  The facts of the matter are that

• (a) we are fundamentally interconnected with the global economy;
• (b) the global economy demands vast resources of energy;
• (c) 70% of the world’s oil reserves and 40% of the natural gas reserves are held in the Strategic Energy Ellipse that stretches from the northern shores of the Caspian Sea to the southern terminus of the Persian Gulf.
• (d)If we cede control of this region, then we cede control of our economy.

We have in place a superstructure of alliances in the region that we need to leverage to maintain our dominant role as the guarantor of safe and stable energy delivery to the world economy.  In opposition to this classic Public Good, the Russians are pursuing a strategy of what I call “Energy Hegemony,” an attempt to dominate those deliveries for private rather than public good, while the Chinese are pursuing a contemporay form of mercantilism I call Petro-Mercantilism, seeking to lock up flows of energy for their own use.  We cannot allow these private good pursuits to defeat the public good approach.  If they do, the world economy as we know it will collapse.

This is the end to which US power (in all the iterations of hard, soft, sweet and sticky power that various schools champion) must be deployed.  It is not about the freedom or democracy of this nation or that people.  It is about ensuring the free flow of energy so the best possible environment for economic and political advancement can be maintained.