South American oil and gas are no longer available to Washington on its own terms. Though Venezuelan and Ecuadoran officials have voiced the suspicion that the U.S. has recently acquired the use of seven new military bases in neighboring Colombia, in part to seize the region's energy resources.
The U.S. belatedly compensated for the loss of Iran after the overthrow of its proxy, Shah Reza Pahlavi, thirty years ago by invading neighboring Iraq in 2003.
The announcement of the Carter Doctrine in January of 1980, which bluntly affirmed that the U.S. would wage war for control of Persian Gulf energy resources and by extension those in other parts of the world, codified then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's threat five years earlier to go to war over oil after the Arab petroleum boycott of 1973-1974.
President Carter's State of the Union address in 1980 included the following comments:
"This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East....Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
The reference to an outside force at the time was the Soviet Union, much nearer the Persian Gulf than the United States. It was later used against a nation in the Gulf, Iraq in 1991, and now is aimed at Iran, another Persian Gulf country.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union in the same year that the U.S. and its NATO and Gulf allies first applied the Carter Doctrine, 1991, areas that for several decades had been off limits to the West now became open frontiers for a new oil rush. The Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions most immediately.
The Gulf of Guinea, where America is planning to soon import 25 percent of all its oil - high-grade crude shipped straight across the Atlantic Ocean on tankers - is the center of plans going back to the beginning of this century for what is now Africa Command (AFRICOM), the U.S.'s first new regional command since Central Command (CENTCOM), which itself was set up in 1983 as an upgrade of the Carter administration's Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in the Middle East, and the NATO Response Force.
In addition to securing West African oil, U.S. and NATO military expansion in the region also aims at denying it to nations like China and Russia. The practice of acquiring oil wells abroad and of denying them to competitors played no small role in triggering the two world wars of the last century.
The Arctic oil and natural gas bonanza is arguably among the main world developments of the new millennium and an analogous situation obtains in the Antarctic and South Atlantic Oceans.
Three news reports of the past week, one American and two Russian, provide an idea of the magnitude of what is at stake.
On September 17 United Press International ran a feature called "Amid Africa's oil boom, U.S. binds ties" which included these observations:
"Potentially major oil strikes announced by an American-led consortium and a British company in West Africa have bolstered the region's reputation as the world's hottest energy zone.
"It has also become the focus of the U.S. military's global mission to protect America's energy supplies...."
The "U.S. military's global mission to protect America's energy supplies" is a phrase that warrants being pondered deliberately and within historical perspective. Even the bellicose brusqueness of Kissinger's war-for-oil advocacy and the Carter Doctrine pale in comparison to the strategic scope of what is now underway.
The same article added these details, pertaining to both ends of the African continent:
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