The Oil Weapon in America's Hands

by Pat Buchanan

In July of 1941, after Japan occupied French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japan's assets in the United States.

Denied hard cash, Japan could not buy the U.S. oil upon which the empire depended for survival. Seeing the Dutch East Indies as her only other source, Japan prepared to invade.

But first she had to eliminate the sole strategic threat to her occupation of the East Indies -- the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor.

FDR's cutoff of oil to Japan was thus a primary cause of WWII in the Pacific, which led to hundreds of thousands of U.S. war dead, the destruction of Japan, Mao's triumph in China and a U.S. war in Korea.
A second stunning use of the oil weapon came in 1973. Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo in retaliation for Nixon's rescue of Israel with an airlift in the Yom Kippur war. Long gas lines helped to bring Nixon down.

Now the oil weapon appears to be back in America's hand.

Due to the substitution of natural gas for oil in heating homes and buildings, horizontal drilling, and hydraulic fracking, which enables us to bring oil and gas out of shale rock in places like North Dakota, U.S. production has exploded. We now produce more oil than Saudi Arabia and the benefits are not only economic, but geostrategic.

Cuba excepted, there is no more hostile regime in Latin America than Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chavez. Oil accounts for 95 percent of his nation's exports. Iran is almost wholly dependent upon oil sales for hard currency. Russia is the oil and gas supplier for much of Europe.
With the price of oil having fallen from over $100 a barrel to below $80 this week, all three nations are suffering plunges in revenue. The United States and Europe are also punishing Russia and Iran with sanctions on their energy sectors.

Iran's production has fallen sharply. Oil-drilling equipment and the latest U.S. drilling technology that Russia has sought to bring on stream its vast Arctic reserves are being denied to her.

As the oil weapon was used by us against Imperial Japan and by the Saudis against us, we are now wielding this sword.

We should remember that it is double-edged.

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