“…urging upon us is a new nationalism, a new way of thinking about international economics that puts the U.S. and its allies first, and uses our economic leverage to advance national rather than global interests.”
In July 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 such places as North Dakota, U.S. production has exploded. We produce more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the benefits are not only economic, but geostrategic.
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