Not
"Islamo-fascism" but "energo-fascism" - the
heavily militarized global struggle over
diminishing supplies of energy - will dominate
world affairs (and darken the lives of ordinary
citizens) in the decades to come. This is so
because top government officials globally are
increasingly unwilling to rely on market forces to
satisfy national energy needs
and are instead assuming direct responsibility for
the procurement, delivery and allocation of energy
supplies.
The leaders of the major powers
are ever more prepared to use force when deemed
necessary to overcome any resistance to their
energy priorities. In the case of the United
States, this has required the conversion of its
armed forces into a global oil-protection service;
two other significant expressions of emerging
energo-fascism are the arrival of Russia as an
"energy superpower" and the repressive
implications of plans to rely on nuclear power.
Energy haves and have-nots With
global demand for energy constantly rising and
supplies contracting (or at least failing to keep
pace), the world is being ever more sharply
divided into two classes of nations: the energy
haves and have-nots. The haves are the nations
with sufficient domestic reserves (some
combination of oil, gas, coal, hydropower, uranium
and alternative sources of energy) to satisfy
their own requirements and be able to export to
other countries; the have-nots lack such reserves
and must make up the deficit with expensive
imports or suffer the consequences.
From
1950 to 2000, when energy was plentiful and cheap,
the distinction did not seem as obvious as long as
the have-nots possessed other forms of power:
immense wealth (like Japan); nuclear weapons (like
Britain and France); or powerful friends (like the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO - and
Warsaw Pact countries).
For poor countries
possessing none of these assets, being a have-not
state was a burden even then, contributing
mightily to the debt crisis that still afflicts
many of them. Today, these other measures of power
have come to seem less important and the
distinction between energy haves and have-nots
correspondingly more significant - even for
wealthy and powerful countries such as the United
States and Japan.
Surprisingly, there are
very few energy haves in the world today. Most
notable among these privileged few are Australia,
Canada, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Nigeria, Qatar,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq (if it
were ever free of conflict), and a few others.
These countries are in an envious position because
they do not have to pay stratospheric prices for
imported oil and natural gas and their ruling
elites can demand all sorts of benefits -
political, economic, diplomatic and military -
from the foreign leaders who come calling to
procure their energy products. Indeed, they can
engage in the delicious game of playing one
foreign leader against another, as Kazakh
President Nursultan Nazarbayev - a regular guest
in Washington and Beijing - has become so adept at
doing.
Pushed even further, this pursuit
of favors can lead to a quest for political
domination - with the sale of vital oil and
natural-gas supplies made contingent on the
recipient's acquiescing to certain political
demands set forth by the seller. No country has
embraced this strategy with greater vigor or
enthusiasm than President Vladimir Putin's Russia.
The rising energy superpower At
the end of the Cold War, it appeared as if Russia
was a forlorn, wasted ex-superpower, impoverished
in spirit, treasure and influence. For years, it
was treated with disdain by US officials. Its
leaders were forced to swallow humiliating
agreements like the expansion of NATO to Moscow's
former satellites in Eastern Europe and the
abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
To many in Washington, it must have seemed as if
Russia was little more than a relic of history, a
has-been never again slated to play a significant
role in world affairs.
Today Moscow, not
Washington, seems to be enjoying the last laugh.
With control over Eurasia's largest reserves of
natural gas and coal as well as enormous supplies
of petroleum and uranium, Russia is the new top
dog - an energy superpower rather than a military
one, but a superpower nonetheless.
First,
a look at the big picture. Russia is the absolute
king of natural-gas producers. According to BP
(the former British Petroleum), it alone possesses
1.7 quadrillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves,
or 27% of the total world supply. This is even
more significant than it might appear because
Europe and the former USSR rely on natural gas for
a larger share of their total energy - 34% - than
any other region of the world. (In North America,
where oil is the dominant fuel, natural gas
accounts for only 25% of the total.)
Because Russia is by far the leading
supplier of Eurasia's gas, it enjoys a position of
supply dominance unmatched by any energy provider
- except Saudi Arabia in the petroleum field. Even
in that realm, Russia is the planet's second
leading producer, falling just 1.4 million barrels
short of Saudi Arabia's 11.0 million barrels per
day at the start of 2006. Russia also possesses
the world's second-largest reserves of coal (after
the US) and is a major consumer of nuclear energy,
with 31 operational reactors.
Soon after
assuming power as president in 1999, Putin set out
to convert this superabundance of energy - the
economic equivalent of a nuclear arsenal - into
the sort of political clout that would restore
Russia's great-power status. By controlling the
flow of energy to other parts of Eurasia from
Russia and former Soviet republics such as
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (whose energy is
exported through Russian pipelines), he reasoned,
he could exercise the sort of political influence
enjoyed by Soviet officials during the heyday of
the Cold War.
To accomplish this, however,
he would have to reverse the wide-ranging
privatization of the oil-and-gas industry that
occurred in the early 1990s after the breakup of
the USSR and bring vital elements of Russia's
privately owned energy industry back under state
control. Since there was no legitimate way to do
this under Russia's post-communist legal system,
Putin and his associates turned to illegitimate
and authoritarian methods to de-privatize these
valuable assets. Here, we see another emerging
face of energo-fascism.
Remarkably, Putin
had long before spelled out the rationale for
concentrating control over Russia's energy
resources in the state's hands. In a 1999 summary
of his PhD dissertation on "Mineral Raw Materials
in the Strategy for Development of the
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