May 23, 2007
Should America Ignore the Middle East? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:50 PM EST Edward Luttwak, a very lively polemicist with a taste for intellectual heresy (I interviewed him for American Heritage back in 1989) has published an essay in Prospect Magazine arguing that we pay far too much attention to the Middle East. In the face of the conventional wisdom about Middle Eastern oil becoming more and more important with the industrialization of China and India, Luttwak argues that on the contrary, Middle Eastern oil is becoming steadily less important: “Between 1981 and 1999—a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged—oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975.” He notes that oil producers with burgeoning populations who can produce nothing else cannot readily employ oil embargos. They must either sell the oil, or starve. There are probably some fallacies lurking in that—oil is fungible, and demand rising, etc.—but for now, let us ignore them. Similarly, Luttwak thinks that commentators on the Middle East regularly fall victim to what he calls the Mussolini syndrome, which he defines as credulity sufficient to take a militarily contemptible adversary at his own very inflated self-valuation (which is how other European powers regarded Italy until they actually fought her or were allied to her). Luttwak thinks that the conventional military power of Middle Eastern states (other than Israel) is derisory, and notes that Western states have twice crushed what was almost certainly the most formidable Middle Eastern Muslim state, Iraq, with almost no Western casualties. He thinks Iran is even more militarily hopeless than Iraq was, and he seems to imply that destroying Iranian nuclear facilities will not produce any devastating increase in terrorism, because Iran is already employing terrorists, whom we have handily survived and against whose employer we can cheaply and effectively retaliate. He thinks Iran is a crumbling multinational empire with a regime loathed by many, perhaps most, of its subjects, and he has a case. As for the cultural creativity of the Middle East, and hence its long-run economic power, Luttwak notes that it has the second lowest literacy rate of any region in the world, one more reason that “we devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa.” There is a lot more, all of it provocative, and while I think the conclusion—that we can and should ignore Middle Eas—is close to ridiculous, the notion that experts can mistakenly assume the crucial importance of a power or region is almost certainly right. Post-World War II France fought hard for its empire, lost, and got steadily richer, while the crimes it has committed to maintain neo-colonial influence in Africa have secured it amazingly small if any advantage in the world of nations. At the end of the nineteenth century, European states regularly contemplated war for generally valueless African colonies. In the mid-nineteenth century, energy resources (of wood) seemed to be running out, and in the eighteenth, access to the hi-tech naval construction material oak also seemed worth fighting for. Stalin won a pyrrhic victory against Finland for some useless buffer territory around Leningrad. At the end of the nineteenth century, the apparently vast wealth of Argentina, the looming economic giant of the New World, mesmerized some economic strategists. Not only Mussolini wasted the time of most strategic analysts who thought about him; Napoleon III produced a lot of useless anxiety too. Cases of geopolitical-analyst tribes who agreed on the crucial importance of something and were ludicrously wrong would repay close study. It seems too much to hope that Luttwak is right about the Middle East, but the larger question is fascinating.
|
