Since world oil production begins to decline on average almost immediately, the U.S. as the biggest end user needs to figure out how to compensate for the losses being sustained in NOPEC production. Their solution, from what we can see now, may be to open the Caspian and accelerate extraction from the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iraq. But the most optimistic scenarios are that all three regions combined might put out an additional 15 million barrels per day. Given that our extrapolated appetite will go up 25 million barrels per day within nine years, provided there is no economic collapse that truncates demand, the U.S. remains in a dilemma.
Compounding that dilemma is the fact that simply getting that additional oil out of the ground and to market will require an investment of an additional $1 trillion in the region by someone.18
Who will bear the burden? Colonized peoples, of course, outside and inside the U.S. via the domination of the petrodollar.
This is almost certainly the plan of the Bush junta. The perennial problem, however, is the mass of people in those nations, who are often militantly radicalized by arrogant foreign plunderers. This puts the imperialists right back on the horns of a dilemma.
The escalation of Palestinian resistance to Zionism19 and the fascist-like response of the Israelis to that resistance, constitutes a threat to the stability of the U.S. client regimes in the region, as does the declining standard of living for the masses in all the Gulf States. These regimes are corrupt and autocratic, and themselves caught in this web of dilemmas. And it is upon them that the U.S. dollar depends, and upon the seignorage of the U.S. dollar that U.S. hegemony depends.
This energy crisis, then, is now combined with a worldwide overproduction crisis, felt even in the United States. And the current administration is opting for war, a very expensive war, for the purpose of extending and consolidating that hegemony, which will further strain the U.S. domestic economy. As this is written, 48 of the 50 states are experiencing severe budget shortages, and the federal government is threatened with default.
This is a desperate move by desperate people, and so it is a dangerous period we are in.
It is no wonder the capitalists of other regions are raising their eyebrows at the Bush Administration. They surely sense the potential consequences of this administration's wild hubris, its military adventurism, its arrogant abrogation of international treaties, its refusal to submit to international law, and its continued support for the Israeli occupation. Some of these capitalists understand that what is taking shape is the military occupation of the world's major oil fields, in the face of fierce resistance from the masses in those states, and they further understand that this is the best way to ensure permanent loss of access to this critical commodity for good.
The Europeans may be courting the Gulf States now, alarmed and angered by the Bush overtures to Russia (which in turn makes overtures to both the U.S. and European Union, like a coy lover choosing between suitors), and the "Bushfeld" junta's apparent attempt to restructure the geopolitical architecture to the detriment of European capital.
The U.S. Government is certainly anticipating this contingency with great anxiety. If the Saudis, for example, under the threat of domestic destabilization from ever more angry and militant masses and focused on the U.S.-Israeli nexus, decided out of self-preservation to punish the U.S., they might withdraw or liquidate all their U.S. dollar-denominated assets from the U.S. and invest them in euro-denominated assets. The only sticking point for them is the fact that U.S. companies perform the lion's share of extraction activities. Nonetheless, if they were to expel the U.S. (a dangerous move, but these are desperate times) and contract with other nations, it would be a devastating blow to the U.S. and have the added incentive of restricting supply and raising the price per barrel, raising domestic revenues to quiet their own restless populations. This nightmare scenario for the Bush de facto Administration is surely fueling their sense of urgency to emplace more and permanent military infrastructure in the region to prepare for this contingency.
As the U.S. commits diplomatic suicide in Palestine and destabilizes Saudi Arabia, there is backroom talk within the Bush Administration of military action against Saudi Arabia.
Arab and Central Asian resistance will be Islamist. The destruction of pan-Arab nationalism and Arab socialism by imperialist forces, often with Islamists as the instrument of that destruction, has left but this one force to give voice to the misery and degradation of the masses. Our moral (and even wishful) assessment of that does not change the fact that this is true. At this point, whether the U.S. supports or opposes the Islamists is irrelevant to Arab and Muslim masses. The U.S. is still supporting Israel, the source of their greatest degradation and humiliation.
The more general economic dislocations of the coming crisis, along with the necessity (from capital's perspective) of gaining control of the diminishing but vital resource, has led to a radical rethinking of military doctrine.
When I was working in Special Forces, we were part of a foreign policy doctrine called Internal Defense and Development (IDAD). That was old school. As I prepared to leave the Army, there was much emphasis, doctrinally and technologically, on something called Operations Other Than War (OOTW). The process of uneven development has begun to culminate in the concentrated urbanization of much of the world's population.
In the past, capital had the capacity to "absorb" these populations who came into the city based on loss of land or the lure of jobs. There was a level of unemployment and misery maintained to "keep them hungry" and compliant, and to buffer against worker demands. But with the rapid restructuring for today's "globalization," there is far less economic "expansion." Instead of the "proletarianization" of the masses, we are seeing in many cases their "lumpenization," as many people are integrated into various criminal enterprises. With the new reality in the world's cities, and the domestic development of various politics of resistance to "globalization," two military developments have emerged
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