YES, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IS ABOUT OIL

NOVANEWS

I realized that I had never taken the trouble to read through Walt-Mearsheimer. So I wandered through their LRB essay. Their evidence is interesting, and proves beyond a doubt that there is an Israel Lobby in the United States. But their conceptual framework is ridiculous, and their notion of how American foreign policy operates dead wrong. Take the conceptual framework, which stipulates a “national interest,” from which the Israel Lobby causes American foreign policy to deviate. Is there a national interest (no quotation marks)? Undoubtedly—Americans have a national interest in avoiding global warming, and in a national healthcare system. Palestinians have a national interest in national liberation.
There is a common-sense national interest, the shared interests an impartial observer would impute to all Americans or all Palestinians or all human beings. But is there a “national interest,” as realist IR theory claims? Of course there isn’t. Capitalism creates vested interests in rampant carbon-producing consumption, with a total “cost” of the annihilation of civilization, and perforce the eventual annihilation of capitalism. The health care system is the least efficient in the developed world, with trillions in costs for the American economy. Palestinians produce a collaborator class, entrenched in the highest levels of the PA and living glitzy make-believe lives in Ramallah. The “national interest” is not a serious concept.
 American politics, as Thomas Ferguson has established, is better explained by the “investment theory”: contending groups of investors struggling for governmental power. The evidence Mearsheimer and Walt adduce is still relevant, and it still establishes that there is an Israel Lobby. But it turns out that the Lobby doesn’t do what M-W think it does. Take one claim, the one I am interested in, because it gets to the issue of causal motors:

Probably the most popular argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and Markovits’s claim that the centrepiece of US Middle East policy is oil, not Israel. There is no question that access to that region’s oil is a vital US strategic interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. Thus, the relevant question is, how does each of those interests affect US policy? We maintain that US policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by the commitment to Israel, not oil interest.
If the oil companies or the oil-producing countries were driving policy, Washington would be tempted to favour the Palestinians instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would almost certainly not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush administration would not be threatening to use military force against Iran. Oil is clearly an important concern for US policymakers, but with the exception of episodes like the 1973 Opec oil embargo, the US commitment to Israel has yet to threaten access to oil. It does, however, contribute to America’s terrorism problem, complicates its efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and helped get the United States involved in wars like Iraq.

This is the trouble when realist scholars of international relations start analyzing political economy. Place to the side that the only two independent variables are the Lobby and oil prices—or access, or the “oil interest,” or “oil companies,” or “oil-producing countries,” (what fun is this conceptual slippage, as we move here-and-there, not bothering to be consistent or to many any sense, the prerogative of scholars working in the interests of domestic power).
To be fair, M-W are only echoing conceptual disagreement amongst Marxian scholars unable to agree on how and why oil affects American policy in the Middle East, but that’s no excuse for not sifting through all the theories to see if any of them are accurate. In any case, there are at least two other influences on American foreign policy: the military-industrial complex, and the interests of capital enterprises not affiliated with petroleum or petroleum-related interests, the broader armament industries, or the Israel Lobby.
Nitzan and Bichler clarify:

The realist failure to square the circle around oil prices is only understandable. The basic reason is that, by the 1970s, while the world was already well into the ‘limited flow’ era, realist theories were still stuck in the ‘free flow’ logic. Stephen Krasner, for example, claimed that there was a negative trade-off between the level and variability of petroleum prices (1978b: 39–40). The consequence, he concluded, was that policy makers had to choose between low but variable prices, or stable but high ones.
Yet, when those lines were written, this menu had already become irrelevant, and in fact misleading. From the late 1960s onward, with oil shifting to a ‘limited flow’ footing, the relationship between the level and variability of prices became positive. The choice now was not between low and variable oil prices as opposed to high and stable ones, but rather between low and stable prices against high and volatile ones.
Obviously, this transition fundamentally altered the relationship between the oil companies and the so-called ‘national interest’. During the early period, when the companies were concerned mainly with concessions, the Administration’s willingness to have higher prices in order to secure stability and access seemed sensible. It helped the companies, as well as the broader U.S. ‘national interest’. Since the late 1960s, however, harmony gave way to discord.
The United States could no longer pay higher prices in order to achieve access and price stability; it couldn’t, simply because access was no longer negotiable, whereas higher prices were clearly causing greater instability. The oil companies, on the other hand, were now interested not in access but in higher prices. Contrary to the earlier situation, therefore, there was now clear conflict between the companies and the ‘national interest’, and the Administration’s pursuit of both instability and higher prices only indicates where its allegiances lay.

Support for Israel, or Israeli belligerence, usually means constant conflict, or the constant potential for conflict, in the Middle East, and constant conflict in the Middle East usually leads to higher oil prices (during the Iran-Iraq War, both sides overproduced, busting OPEC quotas, in order to pay for their arms purchases). This system continued in one or another form through the early 1990s, when every time the average return for major petroleum companies dipped below the Fortune 500’s average return, there was an “energy conflict,” jolting up oil prices and arms sales.
The Gulf War was the temporary break in this pattern: “During the 1990s, dominant capital as a whole was increasingly seeking cross-border expansion, a process which required tranquillity, not turmoil. Given that military conflict endangered such expansion, and that high energy prices threatened to choke the green-field potential of ‘emerging markets’, the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition found itself increasingly isolated.” What happened, as petroleum prices again plummeted in the late 1990s and early 2000? We went to war again, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, whereupon profits for the petroleum companies, the weapons industries, and the Tel-Aviv stock market shot through the roof—just look at the figures—representing a confluence of interests between arms manufacturers, the oil industry, and the Israel Lobby.
Is this a functionalist explanation? Yes, it is. Does it explain the political economy of the Middle East? Fairly compellingly. Does this mean there’s no Lobby, or that it has no power? Not at all: it has plenty of power, just not determinative influence vis-à-vis American foreign policy in the Middle East. Has Nitzan and Bichler’s book been studiously ignored by those writing on the Israel/Zionist/Jewish Lobby? Yes, it has. In the case of M-W, this ignorance makes a great deal of sense. In the case of leftist analysts, this ignorance is more confusing.
It’s not our problem to explain that ignorance, but the repercussions of writing the petrodollar-weapondollar core out of our analyses is all of our problem, especially when those trying to root the Lobby in materialist analyses are dismissed as crypto-Zionists, Jewish apologists for Israel, or whatever term of abuse is hauled in to avoid real discussion.
Technorati Tags: imperialism, Israel Lobby, Nitzan and BicherlRelated posts:

  1. Israel Lobby? Try again Bradley Brooks writes in the AP, “Last year [Brazilian Arch­bishop…
  2. Comments Policy On comments: I generally neither delete nor censor comments, but…
  3. The Banality of Anti-Israel Lobby Doctrine This is a guest post from David Green. My own…
  4. you know Finkelstein got me interested in Palestine There’s a lot to say and get pissed off about…
  5. Bombing Iran: Who’s Calling the Shots? I don’t write about the Lobby and Iran much on…  

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
See: www.maxaj1.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *