The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free by Christopher A. Preble

Author:Christopher A. Preble [Preble, Christopher A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Politics, Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780801457913
Google: mqvOremmrZMC
Goodreads: 6082184
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2009-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Mother of All Public Goods Fallacies: Oil

Of all the public goods rationales offered in defense of the U.S. military’s global posture, none is more important than the presumption that the U.S. military must ensure access to the world’s energy resources—especially that most important resource, oil, from that most volatile region, the Persian Gulf. Even those who are willing to concede that the patterns of international trade, which seemed tenuous in the years immediately following World War II, or during the tense years of the Cold War, might no longer depend on the active protections of the U.S. military, make exceptions in the case of oil.63

It is obvious—painfully so for U.S. consumers who in early 2008 saw the inflation-adjusted price of a gallon of gasoline nearly double over a five-year period64—that the flow of oil is essential to the functioning of the U.S. economy. But the claim that Americans and the rest of the world benefit from, indeed is dependent on, a U.S. military presence in the Middle East to guarantee the flow of oil and natural gas from the region does not withstand close scrutiny. In this section, I explain why many of the fears of disruptions in the flow of oil are grounded in fundamental misconceptions about the way that global energy markets operate.

The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is largely irrelevant—and may well be counterproductive—to ensuring reliable access to energy. Further, to the extent that U.S. policies are useful—in other words, to the extent that the U.S. military posture in the region constitutes a public good—they run afoul of the same problems associated with public goods as discussed in this chapter, especially free riding. The free riders include energy consumers in Europe and Asia, but especially the regimes sitting atop the vast oil reserves in the region whose very survival depends on their ability to get their product to market. If the public goods argument that is associated with ensuring the flow of oil can be shown to be critically flawed, then we must also question other policies ostensibly geared toward keeping the international economy open for business.

Unpacking all of the faulty justifications that have given rise to a permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East would be a long and arduous process and is well beyond the scope of this work. The problem begins with a basic misunderstanding of energy markets. For starters, for all the talk of U.S. “dependence” on foreign oil, the United States is less dependent on foreign sources of oil than are many other countries.65 Not that that means anything. Oil is traded globally, therefore the point of origin—be it foreign or domestic, Nigerian or Norwegian—is essentially irrelevant. Our cars don’t care where the oil comes from any more than they care what port it was received in or where it was refined into gasoline.

It is a grave error, therefore, to exaggerate the strategic and economic significance of Persian Gulf oil for U.S. consumers.66 Although Saudi Arabia is the

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