Posted by
L Gravel on Sunday, October 29, 2006 9:26:32 PM
The
Washington Times in a special report discusses the use of energy as a diplomatic tool:
Major producers such as Venezuela, Russia and Iran have
teamed up with emerging energy consumers -- notably China -- in an
"axis of oil" to frustrate U.S. foreign-policy objectives, according to
Flynt Leverett, a former top Middle East adviser in the Bush
administration, and Pierre Noel, a research fellow with the French
Institute of International Relations.
"The political consequences of recent changes in global energy markets
are posing the most profound challenge to American hegemony since the
end of the Cold War," the two concluded in a recent survey in the
journal National Interest.
Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a veteran of both Bush
administrations and a longtime foreign-policy scholar, conceded earlier
this year she underestimated the ways the "energy question" distorted
international relations.
"I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more as
secretary of state than the way the politics of energy is -- I will use
the word 'warping' -- diplomacy around the world," she told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee in April.
"It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that
power in not very good ways for the international system, states that
would have otherwise have very little power," she said.
Andrei Illarianov, top economic adviser to Russian President Vladimir
Putin before resigning last year in protest at the government's
anti-democratic policies, said reform at home and cooperation with the
West both declined sharply as the Kremlin seized control of the
country's biggest energy companies.
"The correlation was very direct," said Mr. Illarianov, now a research
fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank.