In 1990 to 1991, two years before I was born, America fought what is now sometimes referred to as “the first Gulf War” in Iraq, to repel Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait. That war lasted only seven months and claimed only 146 American lives (about a third of all allied deaths), or so it seemed at the time.
The resulting political and military tensions in the region would erupt again periodically for three decades, most notably in the far more protracted Iraq War that the United States started in early 2003 (after several years of occasional punitive bombing raids on Iraq) and the Iraq portion of the sprawling war a decade later against the terrorist group ISIS and its affiliates.
In Iraq alone, the United States had suffered over four thousand deaths and thirty-two thousand injuries by the time Trump took office. As Trump lamented during his 2016 presidential campaign, the United States has now, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the surrounding regions, spent some $6 trillion waging war since 2001, largely as a reaction to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda, which controls neither Iraq nor Afghanistan.
That $6 trillion is roughly equal to a quarter of the entire federal debt.
And throughout those wars, and ever since I was born, I heard the refrain, usually from protestors on the left, that the United States should spill “no blood for oil.” It sometimes seemed like just another anti-corporate, Marxist taunt. But the more lives and money we expend fighting over regions that likely wouldn’t matter to us so much if they had no oil—and which surely wouldn’t have as much money to spend arming their local terrorist groups if they didn’t have such a large share of the world’s oil—the more sense the anti-war refrain makes.
The MAGA Doctrine means defending our soldiers and the average Joe filling up his gas tank instead of putting them in harm’s way, no matter what the big oil companies, radical environmental groups, or Middle Eastern despots want.
Part of the answer, of course, is to change our military strategy, our understanding of our responsibilities to military allies, and our inflated conception of the ease with which other nations’ cultures can be remolded and their regimes replaced. But another part of the answer is, conservatives have to admit, about oil production. The temptation to go to war decreases if oil becomes significantly more plentiful, less necessary for energy production, and more readily found right here at home without having to worry about the stability of regimes on other continents.
Less than a half-century ago, the Arab oil cartel called OPEC nearly brought America to its knees by temporarily reducing oil production—leading to the so-called energy crisis of the 1970s and the protracted economic slowdown that helped end Jimmy Carter’s presidency and put Ronald Reagan in office.
Now, a combination of fracking, more precise drilling, and more efficient use of natural gas and coal are helping to make the United States nearly “energy independent,” a stated but seemingly unachievable goal of every president since Nixon. It looked like an impossible dream for decades, something akin to “zero carbon emissions.” But now the dream is in sight, in part thanks to Republican insistence on pursuing “all of the above” energy strategies.
Hillary Clinton predicted that under her administration, “We’re gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies outta business.” Instead, President Trump drilled (quite carefully and safely) in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, exited the Paris Climate Agreement, ended the Obama administration’s regulatory “war on coal,” and approved for use several oil and gas pipelines that had languished in environmental-regulation red tape.
Trump’s reduction and streamlining of regulations and permitting procedures has helped push oil and natural gas production to record highs not seen since before the 1970s crisis (and the ensuing explosion in regulation). The United States doubled crude oil exports in 2018 and is a net exporter of natural gas for the first time in sixty years (exports to the European Union have nearly tripled).
All of this means an economic boon for the United States, but there is also an immense, more long-term political boon: The less dependent we are on the political stability of foreign regimes for our energy needs, the harder it becomes for military interventionists to justify risky military engagement abroad. That’s a heartbreaking side effect for a few relentless hawks who, in their own perversely patriotic way, think that the more the United States meddles abroad, the better for everyone. It would be nice if it were that simple, but the body count and unpaid bills suggest otherwise.
When Trump says we are living in a “golden age of American energy dominance,” he’s not announcing a triumphalist oil-wars regime like that in the mad dreams of some of the neoconservatives. He’s announcing the foundation for a new century of peace.
The left hasn’t been without its energy plans, of course.
There’s the Green New Deal touted by Democratic socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, intended to effect in a few short years the complete transformation of civilization into one characterized by central industrial and economic planning, full employment but drastically reduced plane flights, and the adoption of delusional “modern monetary theory” under which no amount of government spending matters because the printing of new currency just crowds out old, pre-green activities in favor of all the wonderful new government-directed green ones.
Notoriously, after months of praising the plan, Senate Democrats voted “present” on the Green New Deal when given a chance to reveal where they stood on the proposal, with Republicans overwhelmingly opposing it and the whole deal going down to a stunning 57–0 defeat. The deal’s pragmatist inspiration, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have shifted quickly to another tactic, and the Democrats probably will, too, if only to avoid having to talk about the debacle again.
Some would-be Democratic presidential nominees have plans of their own as asinine as the Green New Deal, though. Bernie Sanders’s plan would spend a stunning $16 trillion to nationalize large parts of the energy-production economy into something he describes as akin to a giant Tennessee Valley Authority. I mean, I guess it’s better he’s taken inspiration from that than from Stalin’s Five Year Plans, but I wouldn’t trust the government to do more with less under any circumstances. Nationalizing a big chunk of the economy probably means making it dirtier, less productive, and more expensive. “If you like your electricity, you can keep it.” No thanks.
Most left-wing energy plans for a long time now, starting during that ’70s crisis and accelerating during the big environmentalism fad of the ’90s, have mainly focused on convincing Americans to use less energy. Their assumption—driven in part by an excessive fear of global warming—is always that we should be cutting back use, not increasing production. It’s a stealth-Luddite agenda that implies humanity and all its activity is making things worse, is sinful in a sense, and ideally should stop altogether.
Former vice president Al Gore’s climate change plan, touted in part through his film An Inconvenient Truth, would involve cutting human energy use by about one fourth, not the sort of thing you achieve just by doing a little extra weather-stripping around drafty windows. That’d be a big, sudden decrease in civilization’s output and activity, likely yielding very little change in the Earth’s (mostly naturally) ever-fluctuating temperature.
Despite all the efforts to terrify us about global warming, by the way, the fact remains that the Earth’s temperature, to the extent it can even be reliably measured, has gone up only about one degree Celsius over the past hundred years, and sea levels have risen about three inches, which appears to be about the same amount they rose the previous century despite increasing industrial activity since then—and in any case, leaving people plenty of time to move a few inches farther away from the shore if necessary.
The Obamas don’t seem too worried about the problem now that they’re out of the White House and in mid-2019 bought a $15 million mansion right on the edge of a very flat stretch of Martha’s Vineyard beachfront.
If the left sometimes show their hypocrisy and indifference to the masses on the energy and climate issue by doing things like flying private jets all the time or living right next to oceans they claim will rise to kill us all any minute, we should not become complacent about hypocrisy on the right, either.
The willingness of, for example, generations of the elite to fight those devastating wars over oil-rich regions is a perverse side effect of the mingling of private interests and public power. Just as government subsidies for pharmaceutical purchases start looking like a great idea if your family is in the pharmaceutical industry (or, like Medicare Part D architect and former senate majority leader Bill Frist, the hospital management industry), your family being in the oil business just might make you more willing, on a subconscious level, to tolerate great sacrifices (on the part of others, including taxpayers) in the name of keeping the black lifeblood of industry flowing.
It’s not so crazy—it just isn’t necessarily as objective an accounting of the costs as would be made in a pure free market, where you had to pay for the land where pipelines sit with your own money, defend pipelines in trouble spots with your own gun, and fight foreign dictators with your own mercenary army. If you’re willing to do all that—without violating human rights in those countries—more power to you, no pun intended.
President Trump embraces ideas advanced by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been equally skeptical of our so-called alliances in the Middle East. The more energy-dominant we become, the more we produce in forms ranging from oil to coal to hydroelectric, the less oil we have to buy from countries like Saudi Arabia (let us not forget fifteen out of nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian) and Iran, which promotes terror throughout the Middle East and vows to bring about the destruction of Israel and America.
The philosophy of America First means that we no longer have to look outside our shores to fuel our ambitions or make strategic decisions.
The more we can steer clear of the trouble spots of the Arab world, the better, at least until such time as it has become a bit more tolerant and politically open. Having to recognize the United States as an energy exporter instead of importer might give some in that region just the dash of humility necessary in any culture, including our own, to foster civility.
In the long run, the best thing the United States may have going for it in a world desperate for steady energy supplies—so desperate it is sometimes willing to kill and be killed—is a culture of technological innovation. A few decades ago, virtually no one was writing about extracting oil from shale rocks or natural gas via fracking. Now the debate is often over whether these methods are too effective and have (minor) environmental side effects we dislike. So quickly we forget the old problems, like being at the mercy of the Middle East for our energy needs, and move on to more rarefied, relatively pleasant concerns.
Technological advances and growing wealth are like that. Long may they increase. I for one would take more pride in the United States coming up with whole new methods of producing energy—whether from oil, fusion, clean coal, or other methods we haven’t even imagined yet—than in teaching a rising generation it needs to stop using light bulbs and driving cars.
Industry uses energy and ever-advancing technology, and that’s something to be proud of, the hallmark of our species, not a sign of shame.