Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet

[The2ndWheel]

http://www.energybulletin.net/42586.html

It was not supposed to turn out this way.

When the Cold War ended in 1990, American policymakers generally assumed that the United States would henceforth enjoy a position of unchallenged preponderance. It would be secure in its “sole superpower” status by virtue of its unquestioned military superiority and the absence of credible competitors. Military prowess had always proved the determining factor in anointing global champions in the past and would—so the thinking went—continue to do so in the future.

“For America, this is a time of unrivaled military power, economic promise, and cultural influence,” then Texas governor George W. Bush declared in September 1999. Given our overpowering strength, he asserted, the United States had an extraordinary opportunity to extend its dominant position “into the far realm of the future.”<1> But once he assumed the mantle of the presidency and sought to employ this great strength in extending American power around the world, he discovered that military superiority does not constitute the decisive, or even necessarily the leading, determinant of global paramountcy in this troubled new era. Other factors have come to rival military power in importance, and one—energy—has acquired unexpectedly vast significance.

In this new, challenging political landscape, the possession of potent military arsenals can be upstaged by the ownership of mammoth reserves of oil, natural gas, and other sources of primary energy. Hence, Russia, which escaped from the Cold War era in a shattered, demoralized condition, has reemerged as a major actor in the international arena by virtue of its colossal energy resources. For all its military might, the United States has, in contrast, sometimes found itself reduced to cajoling its foreign oil suppliers—including long-term allies such as Saudi Arabia—to increase their petroleum output in order to slow the upward spiral in energy prices.<2> The “sole superpower” has, in short, found itself scrambling—on the battlefield, on global trading floors, and in diplomatic back rooms—to somehow come to terms with what Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) has termed “petro-superpowers”—nations that wield disproportionate power in the international system by virtue of their superior energy reserves.<3>