Buyers and Sellers
Shikha Dalmia tells us to Defend America, Buy More Iranian Oil. Her reasoning echos my arguments regarding those who ominously intone that we couldn’t go a week without Chinese imports. As Ralph Peters breathlessly gasped in “The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs,”
…try to go a single week without buying or using a product made in China. A conflict with Beijing might be lost on the empty shelves of Wal-Mart.
This one-sided interpretation does not devote a single sentence to discussing China’s fundamental dependence upon the American consumer. Naturally China will appear more threatening if one ignores the role exports have played in China’s meteoric growth and the regime’s need to maintain that growth (lest it lose control of the population).
Dalmia makes a similar point regarding the national security implications of oil imports, stating that “Our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is only the flip side of their dependence on our purchases. ” Expanding upon the nature of this dependence, Dalmia argues that
…beneath all of Iran’s saber-rattling and its threat to retaliate against Israel in the event of a U.S. attack, it realizes how suicidal such a move would be… [Iran’s] concern is not so much for the world’s oil consumers, of course, as for the economic consequences for his own country. The Iranian government depends on oil exports for nearly half of its total revenues. If it cuts these exports, buyers could go to other suppliers. But there is not much else that Iran could sell to other countries to replace its lost oil revenues.
Ultimately, all of the bluster on each side - Iran’s nuclear ambitions and oil embargo whispers or American war plans and shows-of-force - is jockeying for position within the larger context of negotiations over the future of Iraq in addition to Iran’s desire to leave parriah status and become a power on the global stage (last two links subscription only).
