‘Full spectrum dominance’

‘FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE’

The stakes in securing military control over Iraqi oil and the entire Arabian Gulf were so high, and the resulting ability to determine the entire economic future of Eurasia and other countries so vital to America’s new imperial strategy, that the costs were clearly considered worth risking.

The Bush administration’s economic policy was simple: Win reelection in 2004 regardless of what it takes. Washington was running staggering budget defi cits of the order of $500 billion a year. Its defi cit in trade was just as high. China and Japan and east Asian exporters invested hundreds of billions of their surplus trade dollars in U.S. Treasury and other assets, out of fear of losing exports, becoming more dependent on the United States in the process. They seemed to be caught up in a process from which they could find no exit.

Alarming as the economic data out of Washington was, no one in either the Federal Reserve or the administration appeared concerned. They now controlled the most essential commodity for world economic growth, its oil. And they controlled it not indirectly, through the support of various regimes in oil regions, but directly, militarily. With their fi rm grip on world oil fl ows, they now held a true weapon of mass destruction, potential blackmail over the rest of the world. Who would dare challenge the dollar?

The contrast between the fi rst oil shock in the 1970s and the events after the Iraq invasion was dramatic. The 1973 Bilderberg policy, set out in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, had been to raise oil prices high enough to make the new discoveries in the North Sea, Alaska and other nonOPEC regions profi table. That fi rst oil shock managed to buy some time for the dollar system.

In the 1970s, powerful groups such as the Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission had been able to postpone the impact of that fi rst oil shock on Europe, Japan, and above all the United States. They did this by imposing the IMF system on the aspirations of most of the emerging world, crushing any nationalist movement for economic development and self-suffi ciency.

They called this ‘sustainable’ growth. It sustained the rich nations of the industrial world and the dollar system for more than three decades, by enforcing ‘limits to growth’ on the rest of the world. The industrial world was able to live some three decades more under the illusion of abundant, cheap oil supporting a living standard unprecedented in history. That illusion, however, had been bought at

the cost of the well-being of the populations of the once-developing world, from Africa to Latin America to Asia. Only through stifl ing the natural aspirations of most of the rest of the world for economic stability and growth could a small handful of nations, led by the United States, enjoy that illusion of prosperity for a little longer.

The IMF played a central role in making that illusion possible. By artifi cially depressing the industrialization of most of the planet, Washington could depress the global demand for oil, and allow U.S. imports of cheap oil to continue to fuel their artifi cial prosperity. American oil output had peaked in the early 1970s. The American way of life depended on an ever rising import of foreign oil.

By the beginning of the new century, even that illusion of abundant, cheap oil was no longer sustainable. The IMF treatment, or its equivalent, was turned on the populations of the industrial world for the fi rst time. As an absolute world oil peak approached, the United States adopted unilateral measures to preserve its power, from rejecting the Kyoto protocol, to refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice over its soldiers and offi cials, to the invading of Iraq and beyond.

Thirty years after the fi rst oil shock, the largest new fi elds had already passed their peak. Washington and the major British and American oil giants no longer had the luxury of counting on regimes with state-owned oil companies to do their bidding. Direct U.S. and British control of world oil and gas assets was the agenda. They preferred to call it promoting democracy in the Middle East. All the evidence pointed to an imminent world peak, an absolute peak, in oil resources, and Washington was leaving little to chance. If 1973 had been a warning call, it was increasingly clear that 2003 was not. It was for real.

At the start of the new millennium, the United Stated held a near monopoly on military technology and might. It commanded the world’s reserve currency and with it was able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. Following the occupation of the oil fi elds of Iraq, one power, the United States, now commanded a near monopoly on future energy resources. The Pentagon had a term for it—‘full spectrum dominance.’ It meant that the United States should control military, economic and political developments, everywhere. They appeared to be well along in the project.

Critics of the unilateral U.S. hegemony saw America’s imperial striving as a consequence of her fundamental weakness, not her strength. Emmanuel Todd, an adviser to the French president, Jacques

Chirac, was one. He projected an alternative coalition of interests between a French and German-centered Europe and Russia, the combination of Eurasian land powers that both Halford Mackinder and Brzezinski had warned against. But by early 2004, that Eurasian coalition was in sad disarray and internal division. The European Union could not even agree on a constitution. Washington appeared to have few serious rivals on the horizon.

The late scholar Edward Said wrote in Al-Ahram, just after the invasion of Iraq:

Every single empire, in its offi cial discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.

He did not live long enough to see whether or not his words would be borne out with the New American Century.7