# Energy and American Foreign Policy **URL:** **By** Roy A. Childs, Jr. **Published:** August 1, 1979 --- “The crowd swelled to nearly two thousand by nightfall, and the protest turned violent when police ordered the crowd to disperse.” On June 25, authorities in Levittown, Pennsylvania, declared a state of emergency in an attempt to end two nights of gasoline riots that resulted in nearly two hundred arrests and more than eighty injuries. The demonstrations began Saturday when, as reported in a story based on U.P.I. and A.P. dispatches, “about twenty truckers were joined in a blockade of an intersection by motorists angered by the closing of a nearby service station. The crowd swelled to nearly two thousand by nightfall, and the protest turned violent when police ordered the crowd to disperse. The crowd returned to the scene Sunday night, and the demonstration was peaceful until a car was set afire in the middle of the intersection. Protestors then pushed a truck from a nearby service station into the flames and violence erupted again.” Police fought the mob with teargas, while the three thousand rioters Sunday night pelted policemen with rocks and bottles. The gasoline riots had begun. Meanwhile, thirteen representatives of OPEC—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—were meeting in Geneva to come to an agreement on a new rise in the price of crude oil. More radical OPEC representatives argued heatedly for a price hike to more than $22 a barrel from the present $14.55, while moderate Arab nations like Saudi Arabia wanted a much lower figure. The delegates finally agreed on a compromise which will mean a price hike in gasoline prices to American citizens of between five and twelve cents per gallon. OPEC members were in agreement on one thing: people in the West had not seen the last of oil price rises; they could expect to pay even more in the months and years to come. June also saw other ominous signs, signs that threatened to erode still further the prosperity and liberty of the American people. Hearings continued in Washington, D.C., on the revival of the draft. Ominous signs threatening world peace were also in the air: The _New York Times_ reported that the departing Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Bernard W. Rogers, who is to succeed Gen. Alexander Haig as NATO’s Supreme Commander, had said on June 21 that “the Pentagon was planning a military force of at least 110,000 men for contingencies in the Middle East or developing countries. . . . Gen. Rogers said that the proposed contingency force would be made up of soldiers, Marines and supporting ships and planes. He said that the force would be self-sustaining and prepared for combat in areas of the third world and the Persian Gulf.” All this comes as the climax and consequence of decades of government intervention into the American economy, in the energy industry, and in the internal affairs of other countries to secure access to crude oil and other energy-related raw materials. It comes as the climax of a confused and bankrupt American foreign policy scrambling to reconstitute itself in the aftermath of the collapse of the Shah of Iran, and of a quarter-century of American foreign policy in the Middle East. But it will not be reconstituted, and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. The chain of events which has led us to our present state, to a state where the American people have been reduced to rioting over gasoline, to being victimized by Arab sheiks, threatened by a return to the slavery of military conscription, and driven into yet another pointless war, is a complex one indeed, and the story is a fascinating and twisted tale of the intertwining of domestic and foreign policy, of government expansion of control in one area to insure the expansion of control in the other. ## The expansionist impulse When we deal in the theme of American expansionism, we must remember something at the outset: America has always been expansionist, for better or for worse. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, it did not always seem so, because its expansion was to territories contiguous to the United States itself: “manifest destiny,” it was called, and its aim was to see the American State a unified whole, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, encompassing all land from the fought-over border with Canada to the fought-over border of Mexico. Until the Civil War, however, the growth in government power in this country was slow and gradual; after the Civil War, the growth of government power began to snowball. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that energy first became of paramount concern to political leaders; as several authors of the articles in this issue point out in some detail, a policy close to classical _laissez-faire_ prevailed for a time. What happened was the development of a philosophy of empire, greatly influenced by the nationalists and soon-to-be Fabians in Europe—especially Britain and Germany —who began to draw American eyes toward an empire across the sea. Monetary manipulations during and after the Civil War—on a state and national level—produced recurring recessions in the post-Civil War period, and intellectuals and opinion leaders turned to Europe for their explanations and their prescriptions. Those explanations held that America needed foreign markets for its goods and services, and that the securing of those markets was a primary duty of the State apparatus. The movement for a Big Navy was born, the Navy being the instrument of territorial expansion. And with that Big Navy movement came a need for fuel oil. Securing that oil shortly became a fundamental aim of policy, foreign and domestic alike. World War I, a scramble over the imperial ambitions of European nations, showed the importance of oil, and the 1920s saw the beginning of fierce competition between the United States and European nations for influence in the all-important Middle East. The 1930s in turn saw even more widespread competition for empire and influence, as imperial rivalries began to flame. The conflict between the United States and Japan was partly over spheres of interest in the Far East, partly over oil. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor occurred only after the U.S. government, in a series of deliberately provocative moves, froze all Japanese assets in the United States and attempted to cut off Japan’s supply of oil in order to cripple Japan’s military adventurism in Asia. The United States lost the least in that war, with not even a single major attack on its own territory, and moved in—as it had decided midway through the war that it must—to pick up the pieces by gathering unto itself what was left of the British and French empires. At the same time, on a domestic level, we were moving into the postwar boom, into what Henry Luce had called “the American Century,” the era of government-guaranteed “cheap energy” and of inflation-financed economic growth. It was the age of subsidies, and the age of regulation. Hand in hand with cheap oil and gasoline came a twisted network of tax-financed roads artificially stimulating the American reliance on the automobile, and a deepening involvement in the Middle East, where so much of the precious crude was to be found. ## The Middle East Writing of this deepening involvement in the Middle East in a blockbuster issue of _The Nation_ (June 9,1979) devoted to “Intervention,” Irene Gendzier has written that > Such intervention, whether direct or indirect, in the form of military, political or economic action, has always been the expression of the aggressive pursuit and defense of American interests. In the 1950s the emphasis was on the strategic nature of those interests and the need to cultivate allies whose policies coincided—or could be made to coincide—with those of the United States. Hence the inclusion of Turkey and Greece into NATO; the support for the Shah after the CIA-engineered expulsion of his Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, allowed him to return to power; the attempt to impose the Baghdad Pact in order to isolate the “radical states” of the region, and the formation of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which was the basis of American military intervention in Lebanon in 1958. Strategic interests also meant keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East, and this always had propaganda value in selling the American people on military intervention. And they meant keeping a fine balance between antagonists: between Israel and its Arab enemies. The continual buildup of support for the Shah in Iran was the other focal point of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The two would both ultimately lead it into near-disaster. With the Nixon Doctrine, which was aimed at a reduction of direct American intervention and relied increasingly on “proxies,” particularly for the protection and defense of American interests, the stage was set for those disasters. Gendzier has pointed out that In the Middle East, two countries emerged as the new axes of American power: Iran and Israel. Israel’s striking military victory in the Six Day War of 1967 enhanced its military prestige and its political usefulness in the eyes of American policy makers.... Iran had embarked on an expanded regional role in the aftermath of Britain’s declared intention in 1968 of leaving the area of the Gulf. Britain withdrew three years later \[and to what disastrous effect?\], and within one year after that the Shah initiated his extravagant purchases of arms from the United States. But the cynical attempt to balance contradictory goals—the American guarantee of Israel’s security against cozying up to the oil-rich Arab states; the unflinching support of the Shah, increasingly isolated from his own people, against counting on a stable Iran—was doomed to ultimate failure. The 1967 Israeli victory in its war with the Arab states had been a quick victory. A quick victory was not to be had in 1973. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia issued a warning: if the United States rushed in to aid Israel in this war, there would be important sanctions against the Americans. The American government paid no heed, and rushed billions of dollars of aid to Israel. The Arab nations lashed out with their ultimate weapon: oil. The 1973 oil embargo was upon us, hitting us in the midst of Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls, which were clamped particularly hard on oil and natural gas. Shortages erupted everywhere, as they alway do during a period of price controls and diminished supply, and the American people were badly hurt. But Nixon did not budge. Instead, like others before and since, he scapegoated the oil companies, and the Arab sheiks. Within a few months, American leaders were even threatening war. “War for oil,” it was called, and the battle cry was everywhere. It was as though Vietnam had never happened: not so much that the lessons of Vietnam had not been learned, but rather as if there were no lessons to be learned. It surfaced first in mid-December 1974, when a note was circulated at the Camp David meeting of President Jerry Ford’s energy advisers: “Let’s try the low-cost option—war.” \[_International Bulletin_, 3/17/75\] To which a real economist, and someone who understands what it is to be human, responded: “This is typical economists’ jargon, that of course deliberately avoids the question: ‘low-cost’ for whom? For the American boys who will fight and die? For the American taxpayer who will be forced to pay the bill? For the Arabs who get killed (or don’t they count?)? For people of all countries who might get incinerated in a new world war?” That was Murray Rothbard, advocate of _laissez-faire_ and opponent of war, writing in the February 1975 issue of _The Libertarian Forum_. But it was not such voices which were, by and large, raised to reach the public ear. Instead, just a few days after the December 1974 meeting of Ford’s energy advisors, we heard the ponderous voice of Henry Kissinger, weighed down with the gravity of self-importance, suggesting explicitly for the first time the possibility of U.S. military intervention to seize Middle Eastern oil. As the indispensable _International Bulletin_ reported it: > In his widely publicized interview with _Business Week_, published January 2, Kissinger said that although he considered military action on oil “a very dangerous course,” he would “not say that there’s no circumstance where we would not use force.” Kissinger added that he was thinking not of a dispute over oil prices, but of “some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.” Kissinger’s statement set off an immediate domestic and international furor, but it received full support from President Ford. In an interview with _Time_ magazine published January 12, Ford was asked to clarify the term “strangulation,” which critics charged is vague enough to justify intervention at almost any time. The President said only, “Strangulation, if you translate into the terms of a human being, means \[is this seriously a President of the United States talking?\] that you are just about on your back.” Two day later, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger expressed his concurrence with the administration position that the U.S. would use force if strangulation of the Western world were threatened. The State Department sought to downplay the significance of Kissinger’s original comments to _Business Week_, and some columnists and editorial writers portrayed the secretary of state as simply stating the obvious.... \[T\]he Kissinger-Ford-Schlesinger threats of military intervention have been taken seriously around the world—from Europe, where they have aroused anxiety, to the Arab states, where they have met with anger, to the U.S., where they have intensified the already growing debate over whether the U.S. should take military action to secure Middle East oil—and if so, when. \[_International Bulletin_, January 17, 1975\] It was their own foreign policy blunders, together with the macho self image which told them they could have whatever they wanted in international affairs, damn the consequences, that had led them to this state. One really must pause here for a moment and let all this sink in. Here are the supposed leaders of the “free world,” having caused an energy crisis through decades of prices held artificially low, through irrational, stubbornly maintained price controls and a bizarre foreign policy which tried in the case of Israel and the Arab countries to have its cake and eat it too. And when Arab nations responded to this—and to Western inflation which had by then gone out of control—by raising prices to a more realistic level, these selfsame leaders threatened to _murder_ them and their subjects, to send American boys off to be chewed up in pointless battle, rather than to let prices rise. Oil prices had risen fourfold. And yet when these selfsame political leaders led us into policies which saw taxes rising fivefold, from less than $100 billion under Lyndon Johnson’s first years, to half a trillion and more under Jimmy Carter, there were no calls to _murder_ them. The situation cannot really be compared: the Arab sheiks, no matter how contemptible, were at least supplying something useful, which people were free not to buy. But hypocrisy is rife in Washington these days. ## Endorsement of intellectuals The call for war by our political leaders was not the worst of things. In an essay written in 1967—“_American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy_”—Irving Kristol pointed out that an imperial policy desperately needed the support of its intellectuals to succeed, and bemoaned the fact that American intellectuals, in the midst of the Vietnam war, were so damned _irresponsible_: rather than accepting the American domination of the world arena and trying to make that domination work better, they stood steadfastly opposed to our efforts in Vietnam and elsewhere. Kristol considered this “_utopian_,” and merely a form of reactionary “isolationism.” The isolationist ideal, Kristol complained, survived not “simply as some kind of ‘_cultural lag_,’ but by reason of being intimately conjoined to ‘the American way of life,’ and to the American intellectual creed. This way of life insisted upon the subordination of public policy to private, individual needs and concerns. It had little use for the ideas of military glory, which Abraham Lincoln called “that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.” It was intensely patriotic, but allergic to all conceptions of national grandeur.” Kristol was not quite right: the American people have always felt a certain quiet grandeur about being a “beacon of liberty.” But he went on to claim that this “isolationism,” so called, utopian and evasive of the American destiny, was slipping in prestige among the American people, but not among the intellectuals. Indeed, “It is among American intellectuals that the isolationist ideal is experiencing its final, convulsive agony.” This was a serious problem, for Kristol knew that “It is much to be doubted that the United States can continue to play an imperial role without the endorsement of its intellectual class.” But in 1967, in the midst of the crime of Vietnam, that endorsement was simply not forthcoming. A few years later, that endorsement seemed a bit easier to get. The call for war for oil was not to come from political figures alone. They were joined by an articulate band of what Harry Elmer Barnes used to call “court intellectuals,” who laid out the case for war . . . well, quite bloodlessly. In the pages of _Harper’s_, in March 1975, a Washington-based professor and defense consultant described as “having intimate links to high-level U.S. policy makers,” published under the pseudonym “Miles Ignotus” an essay called “Seizing Arab Oil.” He was flatly for it. His approach was petulant: if we really were at the mercy of the Arab nations to get our oil, then “we no longer need a foreign policy establishment, and we might as well disband the armed forces unless we double or triple their strength: there is no sense in paying $85 billion a year for impotence.” A telling point, that. But our professor was not about to follow up on that point: he had his very own “scenario,” to wit, we must avoid a failure of nerve: “an Arab embargo or supply cut, an atmosphere of crisis, probably in the aftermath of a short but bloody war. Then we go in.” One might assess the courage of this particular intellectual by noting that he is “courageous” enough to advocate war, but not enough to sign his name to his own views. But not all intellectuals were of such questionable moral character. One man did sign his name to his views—and often. He had been one of the most prominent of the “isolationists” or noninterventionists, identified in the 1972 campaign as a “McGovernite,” correctly or not. In a 1972 book entitled _A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise_?, he had concluded solidly that isolationism was a promise not to be missed, filled with humanity and wisdom and practicality. Two and a half years later, he had defected to the enemy camp. His name is Robert W. Tucker, professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, and he became a figure of some symbolic importance. Had he not, it was said, been one of the most vocal critics of interventionism? And when he appeared, not once but twice, on the cover of the neoconservative, hawkish journal of opinion, _Commentary_, first with “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” in January 1975, and then, a scant two months later, with “Further Reflections on Oil and Force,” was this not something of which we should sit up and take notice? It was. And since we are here dealing with an important symbolic figure, it might do us well to consider what went wrong, if anything. For it really cannot be denied that _A New Isolationism: Threat or Promise_? was a work which even a noninterventionist like Earl Ravenal, writing in the pages of _The Washington Post_, found impressive, if short. ## The isolationist impulse In that work, Tucker held the view that “In light of recent experience . . . the costs of pursuing an interventionary policy hold out every expectation of outweighing by far any reasonable expectation of material benefits.” And he considers some of the strongest arguments for an interventionist foreign policy, one of them being the argument that we must intervene in order to secure access to raw materials (including such things as crude oil) answering those who claim that only by military or other intervention can we guarantee such access: > Why too should we assume that revolutionary, and otherwise hostile, regimes would deny us (or, for that matter, other developed and capitalist nations) their raw materials? These regimes may be expected to exercise direct control over their natural resources and attempt to obtain the best possible price for them. But they will still need foreign exchange to finance their own accelerating import needs, and raw material exports will still provide means for obtaining foreign exchange. The argument that developing states will shut off an isolationist and, consequently, noninterventionist America from present sources of raw materials is as absurd as the argument that once we have clearly abandoned our aspirations in the Third World the Soviet Union will succeed where we have failed. There is no evidence to support this argument, with its evident implication that the constraints a highly nationalistic and pluralistic world have placed on American power will not operate as well to constrain Soviet power. (p. 60) His argument against the notion that we are utterly dependent upon foreign-based raw materials is similarly to the point, and especially relevant in the light of his later conversion. He admits the possibility of our being inconvenienced, but disputes the assumption that such inconvenience need be very great: if foreign, high-yield deposits are shut off, we still have the option of developing domestic, lower-yield deposits with which to replace them. Tucker writes: > How inconvenient this might prove to be in terms of cost would depend upon a number of factors. A rapidly advancing technology would almost certainly reduce significantly this inconvenience. This is true not only of metals—where technology has come to affect every aspect of production, where methods of recovery and recycling are constantly improving, and where prospects for substitutions are almost open-ended—but of practically all minerals and mineral products. In the all-important case of energy, synthetic fuels may be expected in the years to come to play an increasingly prominent role in meeting the so-called energy crisis. Indeed, the “crisis” itself must be questioned inasmuch, for the forseeable future, the United States has within its boundaries resources sufficient to make it quite independent of other nations for its essential energy needs. If what is presently lacking is the technology for utilizing these resources, there is reason for assuming the lack can eventually be met. Yet within a couple of years, Tucker had become the most prominent advocate of invading the OPEC countries to secure access to oil. What had changed his mind? Tucker’s critique of the argument from dependence, as we shall call it, is entirely mechanical and technical. Tucker is no economist, nor an historian, and his ignorance of the two fields (particularly, as we are concerned with here, economics) leads him to abandon his noninterventionism when the going gets rough. Not once in his analysis is he led to consider the effects of such things as price controls, nor to consider the extent to which they might be responsible for the “energy crisis.” Instead, his blindness to economic truths leads him to join the camp of the neoconservative hawks who, paradoxically enough—again—claim to be sympathetic to basic free market economic insights. When his technical estimates of the actual degree of American dependence on foreign oil—a dependence deepened and cemented by American energy policies and economic meddling with the free market—fail him, he turns away from even considering abandoning government power in the realm of economics and of energy. He turns away from the possibility of _laissez-faire_ and so from noninterventionism, and instead turns toward war, which he no doubt will face just as courageously as any other noncombatant. What case does he make, two and a half years after his defense of noninterventionism, for war for oil? To understand this is to understand the key to our energy and foreign policy problems in America today. ## Conversion to war Tucker recites “the reasons that have been given, though only rarely, and then with a rather patronizing air, in rejecting the possibility of using force or posing a credible threat of force.” In sum these arguments are: > that military intervention, though confined to a relatively restricted area, would prove technically very difficult, if not impossible, to carry through successfully, even if it is assumed that the Russians would not respond with force \[on their own borders?\]; that even if technically feasible, intervention would in all likelihood have to be undertaken unilaterally and would provoke the strong condemnation of our major allies, not to mention the complete estrangement of the developing world; that a militarily difficult and politically inexpedient action would also be unnecessary since there are means by which the financial and economic dislocations attending current oil prices can be contained and ultimately managed; and, finally, that military intervention against any of the major oil producers would be seen as an act of moral bankruptcy by the nation itself and, for this reason alone, would not be countenanced by public opinion. \[“Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” _Commentary, January 1975_\] There are other reasons, he states, but these are the main ones, and if any one of them is well taken, then war must be rejected, for “one does not seriously consider a course of action, distasteful \[!\] in any circumstances, that must in the instant case prove impossible, self-defeating, unnecessary or utterly debilitating from a moral standpoint.” Nonetheless, Tucker sweepingly dismisses all these arguments and is willing to see a war launched to forestall—as he sees it, with all the views of causality which are implied—a “disaster” on the level of the depression of the 1930s. (One surely should pause here, too, to consider what are being compared: economic hardship of a regrettable kind, versus mass murder.) But Tucker’s main point is directly related to his earlier defense of isolationism, which was, remember, on technical grounds, sidestepping the economics of the price system and of the effects of wage and price controls. For his major point is simply that it is high oil prices which may precipitate a worldwide depression. For this he offers not a shred of proof. And, indeed, the experience of the post-1973 oil embargo refuted him soundly, particularly in the case of Germany, where there were no price controls, and which never did experience shortages or any severe “energy crisis” other than higher prices, which the Germans were adjusting to nicely, thank you. When someone asks _why_ understanding the price system is so important, _this_ is the answer: without it, there is no way to understand the spontaneous processes of adjustment which a free market can set into motion; without it, in short, one is driven to advocate war. For despite a mountain of words, Tucker’s argument came down to this: “The oil price must come down if the crisis, with all its latent dangers, is to be overcome, but no one knows how this is to be achieved within the short-to-medium term.” Ergo, war. All the rest is a technicality: where and how and when to do it. The reaction to Tucker’s analysis was swift and to the point. Earl Ravenal, writing in the January 18, 1975 _New Republic_, in an article called “The Oil Grab Scenario,” called it a proposal of “international armed robbery.” The indefatigable I. F. Stone, writing on “War for Oil” in the February 6, 1975 _New York Review_, called it “criminal nonsense,” ridiculing Tucker’s sparse knowledge of history, geography and military strategy. Murray Rothbard and Joseph R. Stromberg did similar things in the February 1975 issue of _The Libertarian Forum_. The debate was on. So were the feasibility studies. In 1975, a Congressional study, complete with maps, entitled “Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study,” detailed the pluses and minuses of marching into OPEC, guns blazing. ## Revolt in Iran The Iranian situation was about to speed these plans up. The Shah was in trouble, his grasp on the throats of his people loosened, and a quarter-century of American foreign policy interventionism was about to go down the drain. Irene Gendzier sets the stage for us in her article from _The Nation_ (see also the trilogy of _LR_ editorials in our January 1979 issue): The military cooperation between Iran and the United States began in the immediate post-World War II period. It is estimated that from the end of the war until 1975, more than 11,000 Iranian military personnel were trained at American installations.... Altogether an estimated 8000 Americans, or “a fifth of the Americans in Iran,” were involved in providing military training. Between 1972 and 1976, the total sales of American arms to Iran was $10.4 billion, while that figure was scheduled to reach $18.5 billion for the period 1970–1983. The consequences, in terms of existing Iranian military capability, were fairly stark: American military training and presence would be necessary for any sustained Iranian action.... It was, however, in the training and provisioning of the notorious Iranian security apparatus, SAVAK, which operated not only in Iran but abroad and in the United States, that America demonstrated its willingness to become engaged in a form of intervention far more pervasive and critical to the operation of the Shah’s state than military collaboration and intervention, as previously understood, would have warranted. It is by now an open secret that SAVAK had been set up by the CIA in 1957, and the collaboration intensified over time. The terrorists of SAVAK were not alone in promoting instability and eventual revolution. Anxious as were American leaders to secure access to oil, they were also anxious to funnel the cash to pay for that oil into the hands of the Shah, to be used by him in his efforts on behalf of the forced “modernization” of the Iranian people. For the American liberal establishment was “progressive,” you see. Here we come to yet another element in our story: the role of development economists. For if we are to have “progress” and “modernization,” what path shall we use? Just as there are two fundamental alternatives in foreign policy— nonintervention and war—so too are there two fundamental alternatives in development: _laissez-faire_ and the spontaneous order of a free market, roughly the position of prominent development economist Peter T. Bauer, and state socialism with central economic planning, roughly the model of Gunnar Myrdal. In Iran, it was Myrdal and central planning, hands down, complete with five-year plans and much government-funded investment. Just as in the case of intervention in foreign policy, the forced modernization wreaked havoc with the lives of the Iranian people, destroying ways of life that people had chosen, forcing Western ways on an Islamic people. It caused disruptions and instability, and, together with the preeminent American military presence and the obvious guiding hand of American “planners” advising the Shah, it brought the people of Iran to their feet and into the streets in protest and anger. They rose up and threw the Shah out of their country, telling Americans that they had better follow close behind, or have their “hands chopped off.” The oil stopped flowing, and another crisis—still the price controls were with us—was upon us. The talk about “war for oil” quickened. Writing in the middle of the 1978 Iranian protests, in the July 24, 1978 issue of _Inquiry_, Jan Austin and Banning Garrett pointed out that > In a secret five-page order issued last August, President Carter directed the Pentagon to form a rapid reaction mobile force for quick strikes in Third World crisis spots, primarily in the Persian Gulf. The order, which sets overall guidelines for U.S. defense policy, is known as Presidential Directive 18. The Pentagon still has not given out any details about the mobile strike force, but from press leaks and interviews with informed military analysts, the following picture emerges: the strike force will consist of about 100,000 troops, including two army airborne divisions and a marine amphibious force. In addition, the Pentagon has been directed to beef up its strategic airlift and sealift capacity so that it can quickly transport these forces to a potential combat zone. The strike force will apparently be backed up by two to four aircraft carrier task forces and by up to three air force air wings, totaling about 200 planes. Robert Tucker seemed to be getting his ‘credible threat’ of force. By January 1979, the threat seemed more real than ever, as the Shah was toppled, and planning for eventual war moved into high gear. As the _International Bulletin_ reported it, Although there had been little public discussion of the idea for months, _U.S. News_ reported last November that “Pentagon teams are studying contingency plans involving the use of a ‘quick reaction force’ in future crises” in the Gulf. . . . The renewed attention being given the strike force is clearly in reaction to the crisis in Iran. A Pentagon official told _Internews_ that with the loss of Iran as a regional power, the quick strike force could become more important because “we’ll have to be able to move more quickly and directly” into the region “to protect oil supplies.” \[_IB_, January 29, 1979\] The Shah had been loaded down with one of the largest military forces in the world so that he could act as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, as a U.S. “proxy” and tool of American foreign policy. Now he was on indefinite vacation, and we seemed to be in trouble. The threats and planning were escalated. In February 1979, Defense Secretary Harold Brown told the American people on a television interview show that the U.S. was prepared to “take action that is appropriate, including the use of military force.” Energy Secretary James Schlesinger said that “the United States must move in such a way that it protects those \[oil\] interests, even if that involves the use of military strength or of military presence.” On April 20, _The New York Times_ headlined a story by Drew Middleton: “U.S. Earmarks Force for Fast Deployment in Mideast”: > The United States is forming contingency plans to establish a force of 100,000 troops, including 40,000 combat soldiers, for use in defense of American interests in sensitive areas, according to qualified Pentagon sources. Although the contingency planning for the force covers all of the Middle East and the northwestern Pacific, it is the Persian Gulf area from Iraq in the north to Omán on the Arabian Sea in the south that is regarded by the defense department as the most potentially explosive region. Contingency planning is going on under the accepted strategic doctrine that the United States must be prepared to fight one and a half wars. The major war would be in defense of Western Europe against the Soviet Union \[!\]; the term “half war” refers to intervention in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East or the northwestern Pacific. With Pentagon analysts, it seems, half a war is better than none. So public opinion was being pushed toward war, as fast as the Administration could manage. Suddenly we were selling weapons to anyone in the Persian Gulf who would buy them, never mind that our weapons in Iran had ended up in the hands of the Khomeini, who turned them over to the PLO. And, so that there was no need to publicly argue for increased defense budgets, the Administration began quietly rearranging things so that it could have the stockpile of weapons it needed. And now the Congress is about to vote on registration for the draft. We are headed full speed into war, and no one is thinking. ## Lessons of Iran But what really _were_ the “lessons of Iran”? We have only treated the cause of the revolution, which was in large part American intervention, and the militaristic rantings of our leaders. But what actually was the effect? Were we in the midst of a disaster, as Tucker would have us believe? The best answer was in the pages of _The New Republic_, in the issue of February 24: “Another Lesson of Iran: Oil Embargoes Don’t Matter—The Oil Crisis that Isn’t,” written by S. Fred Singer, who teaches energy economics at the University of Virginia. Singer lost no time in getting to the point: > \[T\]here is no crisis, nor need there be one in the future, unless we make one ourselves. And we surely will do just that if we resort to such controls as mandatory allocations and rationing. These would be designed to maintain a system of price controls in the U.S. while world prices of crude oil rise. This price gap is a sure prescription for “shortages.” We should have learned from the Arab oil embargoes of 1973–74 that intervention with the market for oil and oil products causes all kinds of fearful dislocations, real shortages, economic harm, and many inconveniences. Singer calmly reviewed the facts about prices and the possible price effects of the Iranian cutback, and deduced that if prices rise enough, there will be no shortages, only a period of economic adjustment to higher energy costs. In the unlikely event that _all_ oil should stop flowing from the Middle East, we would have a greater problem, but that was not probable. Singer went on to point out that There is another use for the Iranian oil cutoff—a political one which may have major significance for us. An important lesson can be drawn from the present Iranian experience, namely, that a future oil embargo is not likely to hurt the U.S., or other Western nations for that matter. Right now we have an embargo in every respect but name. . . . The sooner we can demonstrate to everyone that an oil embargo would be largely ineffective, the sooner the world can get on with its business and pursue more rational policies. The Iranian oil cutoff provides such a demonstration, and it should dispel, once and for all, the fear of an embargo, which has so strongly dominated the thinking of governments and of the public over the last five years. The much-vaunted “oil weapon,” he concluded, was a fraud and a hoax: the only likely result of future cutbacks is higher prices, on a gradual basis, and if price controls were abolished, the American economy could easily adjust. _This_ was the lesson of Iran. Our journey through the energy crisis and the crisis of American foreign policy cannot be complete until we draw certain lessons from this crisis, lessons which transcend the narrowly strategic or economic. For if, in the final analysis, government intervention in energy—indeed, in all aspects of economic life—has been destructive and harmful, and if an interventionist foreign policy has brought chaos down around our heads, what are the prospects for an alternative set of policies? What are the prospects for a noninterventionist foreign policy, to replace our present thrust to war? Isn’t it the case that we need to intervene to get access to oil and other raw materials, and that if we do not concern ourselves with the internal politics of other nations, hostile governments may come to power and damage our economic system by shutting off our access to crude oil, or raw materials? ## Lessons of Angola This indeed was the concern a few years back in the situation of Angola, and it is Angola which provides us with a virtual laboratory for the thesis that there is no such threat. In 1976, when faction battled faction in war-torn Angola, the U.S. lined up against factions backed by Cuban troops. President Ford sought to plunge us into the Angolan conflict, but Congress stopped him. At the same time, Ford’s main challenger, Ronald Reagan, was calling for us to “eyeball” the Russians over Angola. These policies lost out: Congress was uneasy with intervention in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and would not budge. We lost that particular conflict, and Cuban-backed elements came to power. Were we cut off from our oil and other raw materials? Far from it. As the _International Bulletin_ pointed out, “Anxious to expand production and obtain badly needed foreign capital, Angola’s leftist government is quietly engaged in a series of negotiations with nearly a dozen U.S. and Western European oil companies. The talks ... concern the opening of large areas of the Angolan coastline to oil exploration.” (January 29, 1979) These negotiations are taking place between the companies and the Angolan government through the Arthur D. Little consulting firm of Cambridge, Mass. And far from disrupting American access to these supplies, Cuban troops are actually being used to protect our access from sabotage by insurgents backed by French interests. No one here is applauding the victory of that Cuban-backed regime; that is not at issue, since the alternative—actual war, the murdering of innocent Angolan blacks—is far more inhumane than that reprehensible regime. Which is the more callous policy: to see the Angolans ruled by leftists, or to bring down upon them war, that is, twentieth century war, with all its attendant civilian horrors? So this is the lesson of Angola: where the State takes responsibility for energy, war will be the result; where the market is left free to function, peace reigns. ## Left and right The energy crisis has been brought to us by government, and so has war. The explosive situation which we face is caused by an explosive situation which lies behind it: the fact that the Left and the Right have not communicated with each other in this country since at least World War I. Instead, they have spat at each other and refused to engage in any meaningful dialogue on the burning issues of our time. This would not be a problem, except for one overwhelmingly important point: each segment of the political spectrum has a partial answer to the problems of the day, but no sooner does it make a right move in one direction, than it makes a wrong move in another. The Right wants a partially deregulated energy policy, usually limiting its demands to _price_ deregulation to solve our energy problems, but it combines this with a call for even more intervention and war in foreign affairs to gain access to oil. The Left wants a partially noninterventionist foreign policy, usually limiting its opposition to troop movements and covert operations, yet it is demanding more regulation in the energy industry: nationalization, central economic planning, “energy plans,” price controls, and taxes. One wants partial nonintervention in the domestic economy, but stepped up intervention in foreign affairs. The other wants partial nonintervention in foreign policy, but stepped up intervention in the domestic economy. Neither goes far enough in the areas where they are right; both are flatly wrong when they back intervention in their approved area. The Left is skeptical of the Right wing’s free market rhetoric, because all too often it is used as a cloak for pro-business subsidies and corporate abuses. The Right is skeptical of the Left wing’s foreign policy, because all too often it masks a welcoming of socialist and communist victories, as when leftist attorney William Kunstler recently declined to sign Joan Baez’s protest against human rights violations in Vietnam, on the grounds that he would brook no public criticism of a socialist country. Both sides are partially right, and partially hypocritical, but we must not, as honest men and women in search of a policy, let their hypocrisy blind us to the truths that they speak. The truth cannot be hypocrisy’s hostage. It must be fought for boldly, and often. If neither goes far enough, then where ought we to go? Toward a noninterventionist foreign policy and a _laissez_\- _faire_ policy in energy, and indeed, in the entire economy as well. The feasibility of _laissez-faire_ in energy has been treated often enough. Apart from stating the unanswerable moral objection that intervention violates individual rights in the countries in which we intervene and ultimately will result in the murder of innocent citizens, we ought to consider as well the costs and benefits of a noninterventionist foreign policy. University of Rochester economist David R. Henderson has done a few simple calculations in this area. The U.S. uses twenty million barrels per day of crude oil, nine million barrels per day being imports, two-thirds of this coming from the OPEC countries and others in the area. If there were a drastic reduction in Arab oil production—say forty percent—the cost of this would be $32 billion to Americans. That is the stark cost, which, just for the sake of argument, leaves out completely the gains to producers in the free world which will result because of their own increased production and sales which would be stimulated by a higher price. Now what would be the savings from going to a noninterventionist foreign policy for America? Not merely a noninterventionist foreign policy toward the Middle East, which would itself save between $20 and $25 billion yearly—but a noninterventionist foreign policy toward the entire world? Defense analyst Earl Ravenal has calculated the cost to us of our interventionist foreign policy at being $88 billion annually. “Europe alone costs us $62 billion a year,” he estimated recently in _Inquiry_ magazine, figuring _direct and indirect costs_. “Less than 30 percent of our entire defense budget goes toward the direct defense of our country and its own essential interests.” If we could save $88 billion a year by pursuing a noninterventionist foreign policy, and slash taxes to that extent—in fact slash taxes even more after we abolish the $10+ billion Department of Energy as a start toward (continued on p. 98) (continued from p. 77) deregulating our domestic economy—and if the cost to American consumers for energy-related purchases is an extra $32 billion, this means that combining a noninterventionist foreign policy with a _laissez-faire_ energy policy would save taxpayers and consumers, on net, more than $66 billion a year. Is this the ‘threat’ which we have to avoid by starting a war? Is this the bogeyman which has been used to frighten the American people? If so, it is about time that we called for a halt to this dangerous nonsense. Both the Left and the Right have valid concerns in this country, even though they are often confused. This is illustrated symbolically by two special issues of magazines devoted to the themes discussed in this issue of _The Libertarian Review_: the June 9, 1979 issue of _The Nation_, devoted to “Intervention,” and the February 2, 1979 issue of _National Review_, devoted to “Nuclear Power.” _The Nation_ contains some vitally important articles detailing the case against intervention in arena after arena. But speckled throughout the issue are the common leftist concerns: the call to adjust to an ‘era of limits,’ the call for more regulation of the oil industry, the hints that capitalism stands behind interventionism, when the truth is that here, as elsewhere, the American business community is split. But the overriding concern in this issue of _The Nation_ is peace, and that is a glorious concern. _National Review_ has as its authentic concern American prosperity, the West’s economic vitality, and the supplying of energy needs for future generations. Speckled throughout are the hawkish sentiments for which _National Review_ is justly famous. Wrongheaded though we think _National Review_ is in its infatuation with nuclear power, its concern with the prosperity of the American people is an honorable one. That, too, is a glorious concern. ## Laissez-faire and peace The themes of the articles in this issue of _The Libertarian Review_ are themes held in common by libertarians everywhere: that we must deregulate and desubsidize everything, letting prices fluctuate freely to reflect real facts of relative scarcity in this country and this world. Deregulation of prices will provide for more domestic energy production, by making it profitable for Americans to produce more energy of diverse kinds. Economists know that there is no prospect of our running out of oil or natural gas: resources of both are more plentiful than can be imagined. Reserves that can be recovered economically is another question: the fact is that there are various categories of reserves of these resources. There are reserves that can be recovered _now_ at existing prices and at existing levels of technology. But as prices gradually rise—as they should, if resources are so scarce—and as new technologies invented by the minds of men and women are born, extracting other energy supplies becomes more and more a likely prospect, a prospect to banish fears that we are “running out of everything,” as the scaremongers tell us to justify more power for themselves: power over our lives, our economy, and our world. We must deregulate not merely prices, but the entire energy industry, root and branch. We must abolish the special monopoly privileges of public utilities which hold us in feudal subjugation, permitting anyone to compete for the right to supply energy—any kind of energy which does not threaten the innocent with violations of their rights—at any mutually agreeable terms. In energy as elsewhere, we must fiercely defend what Robert Nozick has called “capitalist acts between consulting adults.” Alternative technologies must compete in a free market of technologies in the same way as ideas must compete in a free market of ideas, and once more _laissez faire_ must come to mean the diffusion of economic power across an expanding nation. Solar power must be given a chance by ending the government-imposed roadblocks which stand in its way. Other kinds of technology too, must flourish, as human imagination reigns. In all cases must the government be kept out of things: centralization in energy spells death for a free society. An example of government bungling most recently is the case of gasohol, which some people now think is a reasonable substitute for gasoline, relying as it does on the proven American capacity to produce grain and other substances which can be made into alcohol. But no sooner has it appeared that gasohol might be feasible, than the government tries to make it compulsory. That is the logic of government, and if that monstrous institution is permitted to continue its multitudes of mistakes—really, what has it done right in the last century?—we will all sink together. Coupled with this visionary but practical energy policy must come a noninterventionist foreign policy. Businesses must invest at their own risks in foreign countries, not counting on the State Department to bail them out of crises. They must bear their own risks, and see those objective risks reflected in prices which consumers pay, rather than socialize risk through foreign policy, which necessarily distorts information—a foreign policy theme which analysts should begin to borrow from the economic writings of Friedrich Hayek. Interventionist foreign policies cause businesses to make dangerous, unstable, and otherwise unprofitable investments. If we move toward a noninterventionist foreign policy, then perhaps we shall have a chance at peace, and the people of the Third World and elsewhere a chance to make lives for themselves unfettered by tyranny backed by American power. The lessons of this to the Left and to the Right should be crystal clear: each must move further along the lines where they are correct, and abandon half their ideology. Put bluntly, the Left must abandon the false gods of socialism and equality and planning, and the Right must abandon its infatuation with militarism and empire and war. Libertarians here must take the lead, and must above all not allow themselves to be scapegoated or pigeonholed by anyone. They must ignore attacks which have come and will come from the leaders of opinion, Left and Right, and must proudly proclaim, as we have said before so often, their right to their own ideology and movement, and their right to victory. Otherwise the American people will end in a society in which the people riot for gasoline and claw at each other in a scramble for energy made scarce by government policy; in a society cowed by Arab sheiks; in a society threatened by a return to the slavery of military conscription; in a society driven into yet another pointless war. If that is the society we want, then we need only continue on our present course. If we want a society of peace and prosperity, then another course is called for: _laissez-faire_, nonintervention, and opposition to government tyranny and control. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the policy of Liberty. ∎