Energy Security, Connectivity and Living with the Gap
Barnett’s on a roll. This passage is excellent:
We’ll move down the hydrocarbon chain, for sure, but our dependence on the world at large is unlikely to be much diminished. But in the end, all that says is that we have to fix that world and that we have to live with “these people.” Resilience cannot be hoarded.
This reminded me of one of the first posts I wrote here, - going all the way back to December 2005:
Back to Barnett:
We’ll all be forced to continue getting it on the Gap in general. There is no independence in the classic sense once you embrace globalization. And if you choose isolation, then there will be only the slow decay that grows more rapid with time (what we watch in all such disconnected states, no matter their brave fronts and their fiery rhetoric). All this talk about power shifting to oil producers is overblown. They are a scenario to be discounted–financially, politically, militarily, technologically. That much is true. But that’s no real power, because these states are far more dependent on our consumption than vice versa.
We face declining economies and standards of living if we try to isolate ourselves from the global market, while there are compelling moral and pragmatic reasons to engage with the Gap. Recognizing the interdependence means that we’re going to have to find ways to deal with the Gap.
Very satisfying to look back on the stuff I was writing last year and still feel like it’s making sense.
Tom around the web
The ginormous, never-ending, I’m glad that I can do this while I watch the Super Bowl edition ;-) + ZenPundit linked When America threatens war with Iran. + Hot Air used Tom’s ‘connecting the Gap to the Core’ terminology. +…
Trackback by Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog — February 4, 2007 @ 8:35 pm