Oil War in the Americas
Weekend Edition February 13-15, 2015
Sheikhs, Shale, and Socialism
Oil War in the Americas
by RYAN CECIL JOBSON
When Vice President Joe Biden convened the Caribbean Energy Security Summit in Washington on January 26, the Caribbean emerged from its diplomatic slumber as an area of United States’ strategic interest. In light of oil prices that dropped by more than 50 percent from a high watermark of US$115 per barrel in June 2014, the summit of CARICOM members nations was described by Biden as an effort to flag regional dependence on a “single, increasingly unreliable, supplier,” and ensure that “no country should be able to use natural resources as a tool of coercion against any other country.”
The thinly veiled effort to undermine Petrocaribe, the brainchild of the late Venezuelan statesman Hugo Chavez and the marquee regional program of the Bolivarian Republic, demonstrates the uneven geopolitics of cheap oil. Under the terms of Petrocaribe, Caribbean and Central American member states are permitted to purchase Venezuelan oil at preferential rates, with the remaining balance covered by low-interest loans repayable over a period up to 25 years. Cheap oil, often understood as a boon to consumers and net energy importers, poses a decided threat to Petrocaribe and the vulnerable national economies of the Caribbean.
Thus, when President Obama acknowledged the decline in oil prices as one facet of efforts to thwart the Russian economy, it confirmed the suspicions of many that the boom in domestic shale oil and gas production was not merely an avenue of energy independence, but diplomatic warfare. In turn, on the heels of announced sanctions against Venezuelan officials, current President Nicolas Maduro declared the plummeting crude prices a harbinger of “oil war” through which the United States sought to undermine its political adversaries through deliberate manipulation of the market.
With this in mind, a longer view of the Caribbean in the current geopolitical skirmish brings the global stakes of the latest energy crisis into sharper relief. While business analysts diagnose the dip in prices as a standoff between Saudi Arabian crude and American shale oil for global market share, the reentry of the Caribbean into U.S. diplomatic efforts and the burgeoning oil war lends further evidence to cheap oil as an effort to maintain American liberal democracy as a normative condition of world affairs.
Long neglected as an area of American strategic and diplomatic interest since the successful overthrow of Grenada Revolution by Operation Urgent Fury in 1983, the Caribbean has found renewed interest from U.S. officials alongside destabilization efforts in Venezuela that threaten Petrocaribe as an option to satisfy the energy demands of the region and provide momentary relief from international debt. The energy market, in this respect, is far from a neutral force in the international arena. Rather, cheap oil holds the potential to subvert existing circuits of south-south solidarity and, in turn, transform the political geography of the infant 21st Century.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/13/oil-war-in-the-americas/
