With the recent death of Kim Jong-Il and the concomitant worries about the continued stability of the Korean peninsula, American foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific has entered the spotlight.
Foreign policy often seems an arcane and incomprehensible field, an obscure, convoluted chess game being played by Machiavellian geostrategists for incomprehensible ends.
But as with so much of our foreign policy, the current administration's Asia policy turns out to be largely driven by something very simple: the need for energy, specifically, oil. And that foreign policy, in turn, will have a huge impact domestically on the environment.
Follow me past the jump for more details.
Michael Klare has written a penetrating article on the new Asian geopolitical strategy of the Obama administration. It might be described very simply as:
Cold War in Asia + More Dirty Energy
After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American foreign policy establishment has grown tired of wars in the Middle East. There is little appetite at home for more military action in the Middle East, or continuing messy entanglements with oil states in that region. The establishment is hoping to disengage with the Middle East, both militarily and economically.
But with the winding down of our involvements in the Middle East, we need new wars to keep our vast military machine humming. It appears that we will do so by concentrating our power in Asia to contain China.
The new emphasis on Asia and the containment of China is necessary, top officials insist, because the Asia-Pacific region now constitutes the “center of gravity” of world economic activity. While the United States was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes, China had the leeway to expand its influence in the region. For the first time since the end of World War II, Washington is no longer the dominant economic actor there. If the United States is to retain its title as the world’s paramount power, it must, this thinking goes, restore its primacy in the region and roll back Chinese influence. In the coming decades, no foreign policy task will, it is claimed, be more important than this.
In line with its new strategy, the administration has undertaken a number of moves intended to bolster American power in Asia, and so put China on the defensive.
This program to expand our sphere of influence in the Pacific includes increasing both military and economic power.
With regards to economic power, the administration is developing new client states in Asia, to replace our client states in the Middle East. The new free trade treaties signed with South Korea, for instance, are certainly part of this strategy, as is the recent visit of Secretary of State Clinton to Myanmar (previously Burma), a nation with a notorious history of human rights abuses. The aim is to systematically develop an alliance (the "Trans-Pacific Alliance") of Asian states with close economic links to America--and which excludes China--through which we can exert influence in Asia.
On the military side, the most spectacular recent maneuvers are the announcement that a force of 2500 US Marines is to be based in Australia, and a new declaration (the "Manila Declaration") of closer US military ties with the Philippines. These moves will mean more American military activity in waters that surround China.
This kind of aggressive projection of American military might well provoke a counter-response from the Chinese leadership, a corresponding Chinese military buildup to match our own, and a long-term game of low-level military brinksmanship between the US and China, a potential state of affairs that has been described as a "new Cold War."
But is there any more specific purpose for this military deployment, beyond a general desire to flex our muscle? Klare answers that it has to do with the resource that has dictated so much of our policy over the last century: Oil.
As China grows economically, it becomes ever more dependent on imported oil. Military control of the South China Sea means a great deal of control over China's energy supply, as Klare bluntly explains:
Although some of China’s imported oil will travel overland through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia, the great majority of it will still come by tanker from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America over sea lanes policed by the U.S. Navy. Indeed, almost every tanker bringing oil to China travels across the South China Sea, a body of water the Obama administration is now seeking to place under effective naval control.
By securing naval dominance of the South China Sea and adjacent waters, the Obama administration evidently aims to acquire the twenty-first century energy equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear blackmail. Push us too far, the policy implies, and we’ll bring your economy to its knees by blocking your flow of vital energy supplies.
Where does the "More Dirty Energy" part come into this extremely risky and perilous strategy of "energy blackmail"?
In order to exploit China's burgeoning dependence upon Middle Eastern oil, we must lessen our own dependence on that oil. Since the administration has not developed massive alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels, they are instead exploiting the dirtiest and most destructive fossil fuel sources that we can obtain domestically.
Klare terms this a "hemispheric energy policy," as we will be relying heavily on allies in the Western Hemisphere: Canada, Colombia, Brazil.
The U.S., meanwhile, can look forward to an improved energy situation. Thanks to increased production in “tough oil” areas of the United States, including the Arctic seas off Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, future imports are expected to decline, even as energy consumption rises. In addition, more oil is likely to be available from the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East or Africa. Again, this will be thanks to the exploitation of yet more “tough oil” areas, including the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, Brazilian oil fields in the deep Atlantic, and increasingly pacified energy-rich regions of previously war-torn Colombia. According to the Department of Energy, combined production in the United States, Canada, and Brazil is expected to climb by 10.6 million barrels per day between 2009 and 2035 -- an enormous jump, considering that most areas of the world are expecting declining output.
Klare does not discuss nuclear energy, but it's well known to be a part of the administration's energy strategy. The administration has approved the construction of the first new American nuclear power plants in over thirty years.
If more nuclear plants are to be built, existing regulation must be weakened. Perhaps the recent incident involving the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is a harbinger of a new era: even greater deregulation of the industry and increased development of nuclear reactors, with all its attendant hazards.
Far from systematically developing a sustainable energy infrastructure, the administration's policy calls for the very opposite: domestic development of even dirtier fossil fuel energy/nuclear, and importing fossil fuels from Canada and Latin America rather than the Middle East.
So what does all this potentially mean?
It means that most likely, the administration will eventually approve the Keystone XL pipeline, whatever they say at the moment, because their new energy policy necessitates it. Environmentalist opponents of the pipeline should bear in mind the administration's long-term strategy requires this pipeline to go through.
It means that, although we will wind down our wars in the Middle East, we will be ginning up a new permanent war to justify our permanent military deployment, a replacement for the War on Terror, which in turn replaced the Cold War. China will be cast as the Evil Empire, just as the Soviet Union was.
It means that we will continue sacrificing "butter" (domestic economic development) for "guns" (massive military expenditures), just as we did for much of the last century. Instead of spending our money on infrastructure, health care, education, social services, science/technology, arts, and all those things that raise our quality of life, we will be told that those priorities must take a backseat to defeating the new Evil Empire, and that we have to accept a lower standard of living and squander our money on even more military spending, in order to ensure "victory" in this new Cold War.
It means that, in order to keep the oil flowing and our allies happy, we will be forced to back pliable and potentially corrupt client governments in South America and Asia with money and arms, (much as we did in the Middle East), perhaps intervene militarily. Instead of getting entangled in conflicts in the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan), we will simply bring the conflicts closer to home, in the Western Hemisphere (Colombia, Brazil).
It means that in a time when global cooperation, on a scale heretofore unknown in human history, is needed to tackle issues like climate change and the breakdown of the world's economic system, we will be ratcheting up tensions between the US and a nation that is home to 1/6 of the Earth's population.
Instead of cooperation, our leaders will be encouraging a new wave of isolationism, jingoism, xenophobia and militarism, increasing the possibility that small skirmishes could explode into regional or global conflicts.
It means that, instead of moving towards environmental sustainablility, ecological disasters like Deepwater Horizon will become a way of life in America, and that our ever-increasing use of the dirtiest fossil fuels (and possibly nuclear) will accelerate the climate crisis even further.
In the future, Obama's successors, whether Democratic or Republican, may find their options severely limited by his administration's policies. If we continue on this course for another five or ten years, we may find ourselves locked into a scenario of escalating military confrontation and accelerating environmental catastrophe, without any escape.
Given all these possible consequences of the administration's foreign policy, shouldn't we have a thorough debate on these issues before it is too late to change course?