John McCain delivered a speech on energy yesterday that was
billed by various papers as a shift away from Bush Administration
policies. Two things struck me about the
speech. The first is that McCain made
the fairly obvious point that energy and national security are linked. The second is that he called for the U.S. to work closely with other countries to form a global consensus on a new energy
direction. This rhetoric certainly
sounds nice but if you look beyond that, to where McCain’s views on energy overlap
with his foreign policy positions, I think there is a pretty wide gulf between
this supposed new direction, and what his intemperate foreign policy will
allow.
McCain has saved his most incendiary foreign policy language
for three of the world’s most prominent energy exporters: Russia,
Iran and Venezuela. Not only has he intimated that he might “bomb,
bomb, bomb” Iran, but he has called the Venezuelan leadership “wackos,” and
threatened to kick
Russia out of the G-8. It isn’t
clear from this bluster whether McCain recognizes that Europe draws half of
its natural gas and 30 percent of its oil, or that Iran is not only the
world’s 4th largest producer of oil, but also controls a natural gas
supply that is used to
stimulate oil production in the larger Middle East. What is clear is that McCain intends to
continue or even ramp up the confrontational approach that has defined the Bush
Administration.
While frustration with these countries is justified, brash
declarations are unhelpful to the more important pursuit of energy solutions. Of course a key aim of any energy security
policy will be to reduce the geopolitical influence of problem-states. No one is saying otherwise. But if the U.S.wants to assemble as broad a coalition as possible to tackle the enormous
challenge of finding sustainable sources of energy, it will have to ensure that
potential spoilers aren’t constantly tearing at the seams of a hypothetical
arrangement. Russia,
Iran, and Venezuela
- by virtue of their stranglehold on current energy supplies - retain the
ability to throw a wrench into the system, and a responsible energy security
plan should acknowledge that.
The point is not that we should let Putin, Ahmadinejad or Chavez set the boundaries of U.S. energy policy, but that building a mandate for a new direction on energy must deal with the fact that gatekeepers of the current system can still be disruptive. A sound energy policy would result in the marginalization of resource-rich autocratic regimes. Escalating tensions through bad foreign policy before an energy consensus has even formed risks putting the cart before the horse in a really bad way.
