<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><i class="">“...you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."<br class=""></i><div class=""><i class="">--Athenians to the Melians, History of the Peloponnesian War, 5</i></div></div><div class=""><i class=""><br class=""></i></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The 'Hydrocarbon War' was a war for oil and gas, not because the US needed those resources domestically - we’re adequately supplied from the Atlantic basin (N. & S. America, W. Africa) - but because control of Mideast energy resources gives the US a chokehold over competing economies from Germany to China.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The cynosure of US policy remains what it’s been, at least since the Open Door: the economic integration of Eurasia, which would adversely affect the profits of the US 1% & so must be prevented at all costs. (That was the threat posed by the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.) Control of energy could prevent it.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The murderous irony today is that control of MENA’s resources is becoming less effective to that end, in part because of Russian energy resources. The US failed, in the Clinton administration, in its plan to destroy the economy of post-Soviet Russia & reduce it to the status of a Third World country, an economically subservient producer of raw materials. (The Clinton policies did manage so to disrupt the Russian economy that life expectancy actually declined in the 1990s.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">US control of world energy had a 50-year run: the 1967 war put that weapon firmly in US hands (by destroying secular Arab nationalism) - and Putin’s reconstitution of Russia took it out.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">That’s why the Russian president is so cordially hated by the US foreign policy establishment. (And they can't admit why, so they have to make up fantastic stories of Russian imperialism!)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—CGE</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">On Jan 15, 2017, at 9:38 PM, Boyle, Francis A <<a href="mailto:fboyle@illinois.edu" class="">fboyle@illinois.edu</a>> wrote:<br class=""><br class="">And if I remember correctly in his book Thucydides looked at 27 years of unmitigated warfare by his Athenian Republic and argued that in fact they constituted one extended war, which he called The Peloponnesian War. Well I look at the past 27 years of unmitigated warfare by the American Republic in order to steal the oil and gas of the Middle East and Central Asia and call it one extended war: The Hydrocarbon War. Will we suffer the same Fate as Athens?<br class="">Fab.<br class=""> </blockquote></body></html>