How, and to what extent, will the geopolitics of oil determine US foreign policy in the coming decade?
To a great extent, they already do. One has seen the tremendous attempt to build up the Caspian as an alternative to the Persian Gulf as a source of oil. But the striking thing is that this has to a great extent failed. It has failed both because there is not enough oil in the Caspian really to compete with the Persian Gulf but also because there are other buyers: a great deal of that oil will go east to China and even to Japan. If the Chinese economy continues to grow, it is likely that oil prices will rise and rise – until, perhaps, environmental disaster destroys the present world economy and forces the world to limit its consumption. So America’s presence in the Middle East is of course not just about Israel. A tremendous amount of it is about oil – and not just the interests of the oil companies, but genuinely, in the view of many Americans, the preservation of the American way of life. It will be interesting if one sees serious instability in several of the major oil-producers si
