An Ounce of Good Faith
// The price of the question
Will the 21st century be called the age of petro-politics, with oil exporters using their pipelines to raise their geopolitical clout? Will Venezuela and Iran be able to turn OPEC around and make it an instrument of pressure on the West? The questions seem rhetorical to me. I do not think that “petro-politics,” no matter how fashionable it is to talk about today, has much of a future. The anti-American exporters' hopes are going to be dashed.
What has to be understood is that most of the growth in oil consumption expected in the next few years and decades will be in China, India and, believe it or not, Africa. That is to say that the world will experience a rerouting of those pipelines, away from the West toward new centers of economic power. Nor is there any reason to think that oil and gas mean big money for all time. The search for new sources of energy in the West, where gasoline will be replaced by fuels made out of corn, grass and other things, is more serious than we think.
There is one more circumstance that has to be considered. There is always a balance of interests between exporters and importers – a relationship, rather than dependence. If the prices for oil and gas rise, the price for everything that goes with them – equipment, production and transport – goes up as well. The balance is restored and the drive toward higher prices does no one any good. There is a boomerang effect, in which everyone loses.
An attempt was already made in the 1970s to use fossil fuels in big politics, to bang fists on the table and show the world who's boss. I remember a cartoon from that era that showed an Arab sheikh beating blond European women over the heads with barrels of oil. That is an impossible dream for Presidents Chavez and Ahmadinejad today. Even if that sheikh wanted to do that now, he would have to throw his barrels in a number of directions. The OPEC countries do not have a common enemy. A significant number of them – Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies – are allies of the United States.
The world is not going t make the same mistake twice. Venezuela and Iran are engaged in geopolitical populism. Efforts of that sort are made out of desperation, when there are no other means of influencing the world. Russia must stay away from that populism to restore its battered badly damaged trust from Western consumers. That trust is valuable and it would be the height of foolhardiness to risk it.
Alexey Malashenko, the Moscow Carnegie Center
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 19, 2007
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