A new look at how Henry Kissinger's State Department dealt with the energy crises of the 1970s.
But perhaps the reason for supporting new solutions to our old energy problems that gets underplayed most often by green-tech advocates is the role energy plays in shaping world affairs. The easy version of this argument is: OIL WARS! HUGO CHAVEZ! OPEC! The more nuanced story is that our need to extract and consume vast amounts of resources that sit underneath other countries makes things difficult for our diplomats sometimes.
The new monograph reveals in-depth conversation, memoranda, and other primary documents related to State's global program to deal with rising oil prices in an environment our previous policies had already shaped.
For example, there are 85 references to the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who the US helped install in power through a coup of the democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh. Why'd we throw Mosaddegh out of power? To oversimplify, he tried to nationalize the country's oil industry. Subsequently, the Shah was tossed out during the Iranian revolution, and that's how the country's Islamists came to power. All of this history is a bit too pat, of course, but that's at least the sequence of events. Energy and our foreign policy are permanently entangled.
These are the kinds of soft costs (not to mention ethical quandaries) that rarely make it on to the spreadsheets that calculate the price of US dependence on foreign fuel. And I'd only point out that greens have never adequately exploited the national security angles to domestic energy production; perhaps there is something in its bald nationalism that cuts rubs many earth-minded people the wrong way.
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