The Frugal Superpower: America's Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era

by Michael Mandelbaum

  Nor, even if a territorial and political settlement between Israel and all its neighbors could be achieved, would this end, or even substantially attenuate, the many other Middle Eastern conflicts, some of which are far older and bloodier than the one between Arabs and Israelis. As a way to make American policy in the region cheaper and easier, therefore, what came to be known as the “peace process” failed and, even if the specific negotiations that it involved had come to fruition, was never likely to make the Middle East entirely safe for American interests.

  The administration of George W. Bush, who succeeded Bill Clinton as the American president, adopted a different approach to the transformation of the Middle East: the promotion of democracy in the region. This approach came about partly by accident. For reasons having nothing to do with democracy, the United States attacked Iraq, deposed Saddam Hussein as its ruler, and then found itself, contrary to the administration’s wishes and expectations, occupying the country and facing the task of establishing a new government there. It was natural for the United States, given its deep and abiding commitment to democratic principles, to seek to make the government it established a democratic one. Having made a commitment to democracy in Iraq, the president broadened that commitment to include the entire region, with the promise, or at least the hope, that the advent of democracy throughout the Middle East would transform the region in a way that would make it more congenial to, and less burdensome for, the United States.

  Iraq held a series of more or less free and fair elections, as did Lebanon. The Egyptian government, however, which maintained close ties to and received generous annual aid payments from the United States, staged a presidential election that was neither free nor fair, and elections that seemed to meet both standards in the Palestinian territories were won by Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group that openly sponsored terrorism and was committed to an anti-Western program that included the destruction of the state of Israel. Elsewhere in the Arab world, despite the Bush administration’s urging, the ruling autocrats, even those most dependent on the United States, showed no sign of permitting democracy to take root.

  Success in promoting democracy throughout the Middle East would surely change the region in ways favorable to American interests. This would be the case, however, only if the countries there were to become genuine democracies, incorporating into their political systems not only the selection of the government by popular vote but also the defense of liberty—the protection of economic, religious, and political freedom. Because genuine democracies tend to conduct more cooperative, less militant foreign policies than non-democracies, if the Bush project for the Middle East were actually to succeed, the international relations of the region would come to resemble those of twenty-first-century Europe, which would make the safeguarding of American and global interests there far easier.

  Ironically, the Middle Eastern country best prepared for democracy turned out to be the one most threatening to the United States. The Iranian regime staged a presidential election in 2009 in which only its officially approved candidates could run. When the election was apparently stolen from one of these candidates on behalf of another—the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—millions of people took to the streets to protest. The spontaneous public participation in the demonstrations throughout the country suggested that the Iranian people both want and are capable of operating a democratic political system. In that case, the obstacle to Iranian democracy—and therefore, perhaps, to a far less aggressive, ideologically motivated foreign policy—is the commitment of the theocratic regime to use force to remain in power.

  Arab governments were also willing to turn their guns on the people they governed to keep themselves in power, but in the Arab countries the demand for free elections and especially for the freedoms of speech, the press, and religion seemed considerably weaker than among their Persian neighbors. The absence of the relevant values, skills, and traditions, as well as the vigilant opposition to it of the armed forces and secret police forces the regimes controlled, obstructed the spread of democracy in the Arab world.

  Neither the Arab-Israeli peace process nor the promotion of democracy therefore seems a promising way to lighten the burden of American foreign policy, in an era of reduced resources, in the one part of the world where the effort required of the United States will certainly remain substantial. There is, however, a third means to this end, one that would gradually alter the region so as to diminish the threat to American and global interests. Unlike the other two strategies, this approach to the transformation of the Middle East and its role in global security affairs lies within the power of the United States to implement. This third mechanism for transformation is to reduce the American consumption of oil.

  OIL

  Because the United States accounts for so much of the world’s oil usage, a major reduction in American consumption could lower overall consumption enough to reduce the global price of the commodity. This would decrease the money accruing to the governments that depend heavily, in some cases almost exclusively, on the sale of oil to finance their operations. Iran is one such country. The sale of oil accounts for 80 percent of its annual revenue. Reducing the income of the Islamic Republic would give its rulers less money to spend on the policies that threaten the rest of the region and the world, including its ongoing effort to acquire nuclear weapons and a fleet of missiles to deliver them to distant targets and its shipments of funds and weapons to two terrorist organizations, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

  Restricting the stream of Iranian oil revenue would have an even more powerful effect on the regime: it would undermine its internal stability. The Islamic Republic depends, for its survival, on the support of constituencies that themselves rely on money from the state treasury: the militia known as the Revolutionary Guards, for instance, and employees of the country’s large government-funded commercial monopolies. The Iranian government buys such loyalty as it enjoys within the country. Fewer resources would result in less loyalty.

  In seeking to stop the mullahs’ nuclear weapon program the American government has tried, without success, to persuade other countries to join the United States in imposing economic sanctions on Iran. A sharp reduction in oil revenues, for which a sharp reduction in American oil consumption is a necessary condition, would have precisely the impact that Washington has vainly sought to produce through international agreement.

  A cutback in the American consumption of oil, leading to a reduction in the income oil generates for the countries that export it, would make the Middle East less troublesome for the United States and the world in ways that go beyond the impact on Iran. Notably, it would reduce the resources at the disposal of the government and political elite of Saudi Arabia. While nominally, and in some ways actually, an ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia has also contributed to the difficulties the United States has encountered in the Middle East through the propagation of its official ideology, an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism known as Wahhabism.

  This ideology inspired many of the Middle Eastern terrorists who have attacked Western targets, including the perpetrators of the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001. In the three airplanes that were hijacked to mount these attacks, eighteen of the twenty-one hijackers were Saudi nationals. The Saudi government pays for many of the madrassas—the religious schools—in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as in its own country, in which students who later join extremist groups receive fundamentalist indoctrination. Some of the money that flows from gasoline-buying Americans to the Saudi treasury finds its way, often via wealthy Saudi sympathizers, into the coffers of these same extremist groups, including al Qaeda. Thus it is that the United States is waging a war against terrorism and funding both sides. Using less oil would reduce the money going to the side that Americans do not wish to support.

  If the United States consumed less oil this would bring yet another benefit to its Middle Eastern policies. The less the world relies on o
il, and therefore the less it relies on oil from that region, the less important to the rest of the world the region will be. True, the United States gets relatively little of the oil it imports directly from the Persian Gulf. Since oil is a fungible, globally traded commodity, however, any disturbance in its outflow from the Gulf would automatically, and negatively, affect the United States, in the first instance by increasing the price that Americans, along with everyone else, would have to pay for gasoline. Even if, as is not the case, the flow of oil from the Gulf affected only those countries directly consuming it—Japan above all—the global scope of American interests and commitments means that the United States would be harmed by any interruption in its supply from the region. Reducing the importance of that supply, no matter who consumes it, would therefore lower the stakes and lighten the burden of American engagement in the Middle East.

  To be sure, the world will not be able to do entirely without oil from the Persian Gulf for many decades. The global transportation fleet will need petroleum to operate far into the twenty-first century, and perhaps beyond. But substantially reducing the planet’s use of oil would shift the balance of power between producers and consumers in favor of consumers—that is, in favor of the United States, its friends, its allies, and all the countries with large industrial economies. Indeed, given the expected growth in demand for oil in Asia, especially in China and India, a reduction in consumption by the United States will be necessary to prevent overall oil consumption from a steep rise that would tilt the balance further toward the producers and make the Middle East even more important than it is now for the rest of the world. The anticipated growth in global demand in the second and third decades of this century places the world, where oil is concerned, metaphorically on a treadmill moving in the wrong direction. The consuming countries will have to take significant measures to suppress consumption simply to avoid worsening the adverse global trends that oil fosters.

  Substantially reducing the consumption of oil in the United States would have, from the American point of view, a positive effect on the policies of troublesome countries even beyond the Middle East, countries whose governments, like those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, depend on oil revenues. Venezuela is one of them. In the first decade of the new century Hugo Chavez, its leader, made himself Latin America’s major opponent of the United States. He used the revenues from the country’s exports of oil to buy popularity among sectors of Venezuelan society, bestow favors on communist Cuba, and promote himself around the world as a figure of significance. Without these revenues he would hardly have attracted notice beyond his country’s borders and probably could not have survived in power, or perhaps even achieved high office in the first place.

  Russia is another country whose twenty-first-century foreign policy runs on oil money. It was not the reflexively anti-American policies that its leader, Vladimir Putin, carried out, or his steady suppression of domestic political opposition, that earned him the impressively high approval ratings he received from his countrymen through this century’s first decade. He owed his popularity, rather, to the windfall oil profits that accrued to Russia, which the government used to pay pensions and salaries to a grateful public. Without oil revenues Putin, like Chavez, would not have had the resources to carry out policies antagonistic to the United States and might not have been able to remain president (and then prime minister) of his country.

  The sharp fall in the price of oil occasioned by the global recession following the events of September 15, 2008, put a dent in the popularity of the Putin regime, offering a preview of its likely fate if Russia’s oil revenues should go into permanent decline. In fact, the decrease in the global oil price in the 1980s played a role in the demise of the Soviet Union itself. The loss in income made more urgent the economic reforms undertaken by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, which set in motion the events that culminated in the Soviet collapse.

  Reducing American oil consumption would even help to ease a potential source of friction with China. That country is a net importer rather than an exporter of oil. Its dependence on oil will rise steadily as its economy expands. That dependence is a possible source of international discord. The diplomacy of the Chinese government since the beginning of the new century has sought to ensure reliable supplies of the raw materials the country’s industries require, most of which are not found within its borders. This has led to friendly relations with odious regimes governing resource-rich countries, such as the one in Sudan even as it was waging a murderous war against the people of Darfur.

  China’s drive to secure resources, especially oil, could bring it into military conflict with the United States. The most likely incentive for China to build a major naval force that could challenge the U.S. Navy would be a decision by the Chinese government that the country’s security required a Chinese force to safeguard the sea lanes through which oil reaches the Chinese mainland. The less important oil becomes, and the less pressure there is to ensure the supply of it, the weaker that incentive will be.

  Substantially reducing the role of oil in the American, Chinese, and global economies would, over the long term, lower the cost of America’s international obligations in one final way: it would enhance the prospects for democracy, and therefore for democratically inspired peaceful foreign policies. Oil is the enemy of democracy. Countries that depend on large reserves of it for most of their income almost never have democratic governments. For this there are two main reasons.

  First, with the money that flows to the government from the sale of oil comes the temptation for those in charge of the government to do whatever is necessary to maintain power and thus access to that money, rather than submitting themselves to the will of the public through democratic elections. Second, oil-rich countries tend not to develop the institutions of a free-market economy: they don’t need them to achieve prosperity. But it is precisely the experience of operating these institutions—private property, a working financial system, a proper legal order—that over time promotes democratic politics. Deprived of their very large oil revenues, Iran and Russia, for example, would have to earn their way in the world by establishing effective free-market economies. If they were able to do so, they would set in motion internal forces that promote democratic governance. Democracy would, on the whole and all other things being equal, incline them to less hostile, more cooperative foreign policies.

  Appreciably reducing the role of oil in the global economy and in the politics and economics of the oil-exporting countries would, in sum, have broad and favorable consequences for international security, and especially for the tasks that have fallen to the United States to carry out. So substantial and so favorable would such consequences be that the reduction of its use of oil qualifies as the single most important thing the United States could do to achieve its international goals. As such, cutting back on oil consumption bears comparison with the central strategic mission of the United States for most of the second half of the twentieth century: containment.

  THE NEW CONTAINMENT

  During the Cold War the United States adopted as its chief foreign policy goal preventing the international communist movement, led by the Soviet Union, from spreading its influence and its direct control to non-communist parts of the world. The original policy of containment sought to protect Western Europe but was subsequently broadened to include much of the rest of the world.

  At the outset the policy relied on political and economic tools. The American program of economic assistance to Western Europe, the Marshall Plan, which was launched in 1947, aimed to foster economic recovery from the shattering effects of war in the recipient countries in order to make them invulnerable to the political appeal of communism and to communist subversion. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, containment became mainly a military effort. The United States deployed a large army in West Germany to block a Soviet attack on Western Europe, maintained a large stockpile of nuclear weapons to offset the comparable Soviet arsenal, acquired mi
litary bases in and provided military assistance to many countries around the world, and waged two substantial wars, in Korea and Indochina—all for the purpose of resisting the spread of communism. With this Cold War policy of containment, a reduction in American oil consumption has three important features in common.

  First, like containment, it is central to American purposes in the world. Just as almost every policy the United States carried out beyond its borders from the mid-1940s to the beginning of the 1990s was connected in some way to the task of resisting communist power and influence, so reducing American dependence on oil would help to alleviate most of the major problems of international security the United States faces.

  Second, containment was a protracted policy, lasting for decades, and for most of that period had a defensive purpose. Far from hoping to overthrow its adversary, for most of the Cold War the United States thought of itself as struggling to hold the line against a powerful foe, to keep communism in check and to prevent the American position in the world from deteriorating. Similarly, it will not be possible for the United States and the other democracies to wean themselves from imported oil quickly or easily. Reducing oil consumption, like containment, will have to be a protracted effort, one whose success may well be judged, at least at first, by whether it prevents a sharp increase in American and global dependence on Middle Eastern petroleum. Like containment, it will have to span multiple presidential administrations and have the unwavering support of both political parties.

  Third, the policy of containment generally succeeded in preventing major setbacks for the United States and its allies and ultimately helped to create the conditions in which communism in Europe collapsed because the American public was willing to pay for it with its tax dollars over several decades. While it did not involve the degree of national mobilization or the level of sacrifice that waging and winning World War II had required of the United States, containment was not free. Over its lifetime, Americans annually devoted between 5 and 10 percent of their total national income to defense spending, virtually all of which supported the containment, in one way or another, of communism.