An article former SAIS student James Mina and I wrote on ‘Circumventing Hormuz’ appears in the February–March 2014 issue of Survival. The International Institute for Strategic Studies today published this related post:
Day: January 28, 2014
Hammer out danger
What has Pete Seeger, who died yesterday, got to do with Egypt?
Many Egyptians are genuinely enthusiastic about Field Marshall Sisi’s impending run for the presidency. They hope he will bring stability to a country in its third year of revolutionary upheaval. They want the economy to recover and their families to return to a more normal existence.
Rarely are international commenters more unanimous in their opposing views: Sisi, the finest intellects think, has little chance of providing the stability Egyptians crave unless he changes course and enables a far more inclusive polity. The current crackdowns on both the Muslim Brothers, who are many, and Sisi’s secularist opponents, who are few, will serve only to drive Egypt further into autocracy and an eventual return to turmoil.
Who is right? The Egyptians in the street who proudly point to airbrushed pictures of the Field Marshall? Or the international intellectuals, none of whom have ever run a country?
My heart is with the Egyptians. They should get what they want. It is not for me or any non-Egyptian to choose who leads Egypt, or to tell Egyptians what system they should install to gain their aspirations. If they want to restore the military autocracy, or something akin to it with a few more power centers, why should I object? Each to his own. Read more
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Tags : Egypt
Diversifying Hormuz protection
While my career in recent years has focused on politics, especially in the Balkans and Middle East, I have a long history with energy issues. They were already big in 1972, when I was on the secretariat for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment. Even then global warming was on the agenda. I worked in the mid-1970s at the National Center for Analysis of Energy Systems at Brookhaven National Laboratory and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, handled energy issues as Science Counselor of the US Embassies in Rome and Brasilia.
In 1984 I became director of ‘energy consuming country affairs’ at the State Department, a role that included representing the United States at the International Energy Agency’s Standing Committee on Emergency Questions.
It was while oil prices were low in the mid-1980s that we convinced our IEA partners to put in place the ‘coordinated early stock draw’ procedures that are today an important part of the global response to an oil supply disruption.
But proud as I am of that achievement, I’ve come to believe that we missed opportunities to go much further in building up civilian responses to the problem James Mina and I discuss in my Survival article, ‘Circumventing Hormuz’. Over-reliance on military instruments has been costly and counter-productive. We should long ago have pressed non-IEA oil importers (especially China and India) to increase stocks (and coordinate their drawdown) and oil exporters to ensure supply by building pipelines and using them to their maximum capacity.
The current increase in US oil and gas production, while it does not insulate us from the economic harm due to an oil-supply disruption and the resulting price spike, provides an opportunity to beef up these civilian responses, redistribute burdens and lower American military costs. It also provides an opportunity to make protection of oil flow through Hormuz a multinational responsibility, with contributions from major Asian oil importers. This would relieve some of the burden on the US Navy and make it less likely Iran will ever disrupt Gulf oil supplies.
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Tags : China, Gulf states, India, United States
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