Tom Friedman on ‘Being Green is the New Red White and Blue”
Weekend Reading: Thomas Friedman on Energy Gluttony and Security in the Middle East and Beyond
In Yesterday’s New York Times, columnist and author Tom Friedman writes calls for a mature U.S. energy policy as central to the US and global security. Unfortunately, the piece is behind New York Time’s firewall, but thankfully it is freely available from my city library’s online database.
Most strikingly Friendman states that “A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.”
In a sense he is correct. Reform in the Middle East will be more about economic diversity/connectivity rather than democracy. As we know petrol states suffer from lacking both, but economic connectivity (beyond just state oil companies selling black gold abroad) will help foster political moderation and pull these states from Gap to the Seam and to the Core (to use Thomas Barnett’s terminology).
Here’s an excerpt from Friendman’s article, “Being Green is the New Red White and Blue“:
The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It’s petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices — in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran — that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one’s citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one’s enemies, and using oil profits to build up one’s internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.
When a nation’s leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people’s energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people’s ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.
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