When I began my ‘third career’ as a public intellectual a dozen years ago, I found my own voice by reading and critiquing what the leaders of the U.S. foreign policy community were saying in their books and in their contributions to Foreign Affairs magazine, then as now the ‘industry standard,’ with the world’s largest number of subscribers to a publication of its kind.
At a certain point, critiquing others as an exercise became a repetitive bore and I moved on to writing and publishing my own ‘take’ on global current events, in particular as they relate to Russia, with only occasional reference to what others are saying.
Today is one of those special occasions. It is all the more rare in that my dual purpose in writing is first to promote to my readership an excellent overview of the Middle East by one of America’s most experienced and authoritative former ambassadors to the region and second to show how another perspective, coming from a different analytical toolkit can complement what is otherwise a magisterial performance by Ambassador Chas Freeman.
You can find Ambassador Freeman’s speech here in both text and video:
The hosts for his speech were the Middle East Forum, an organization founded in 2006 in Falmouth, Massachusetts. They currently present lectures by regional experts via Zoom to an audience principally consisting of academics and U.S. diplomats. Their website is here: https://www.meff.world/
Ambassador Freeman’s talk is ‘magisterial’ because it is grounded in profound knowledge of each of the countries of the region. His grasp of the Arabic language and culture, his mastery of the history of each country and of their interaction both among themselves and with the external world over centuries places Freeman solidly in the Realist school of international affairs. From this perspective, he chides U.S. diplomacy for its obtuseness and seeming inability to deal with the interests of others in the Middle East.
As we know, U.S. diplomacy is dominated by the thinking of the Wilsonian, or Idealist school which by definition pays little heed to the traditions and interests of others, believing as it does that universal rules govern human relations and that local peculiarities are irrelevant. U.S. policy is mired in overarching ideological concerns, which frame relations with other countries in a simplistic ‘with us or against us,’ ‘authoritarian or democratic’ duality that is in the end counterproductive for its objectives.
My main remark on Freeman’s presentation is its failure to give due attention to the economic drivers of the vast changes in the Middle Eastern geopolitical landscape that we are now witnessing. The Ambassador focuses on sponsor-protégé relationships and on the support being given by the region’s leaders to emerging multipolarity at the expense of fealty to the United States as global and regional hegemon.
As Freeman rightly notes, U.S. global supremacy is underwritten by the “exorbitant privilege” it enjoys from the dollar being the world’s reserve currency. However, his explanation of ongoing “de-dollarization” does not stand on sturdy legs. The creation of the “petrodollar” in 1973 as an overall solution to the dollar becoming a fiat currency after it was de-pegged from gold was founded on the reality of the time that the United States was the largest importer of Gulf oil. However, the onset of U.S. self-sufficiency in hydrocarbons two decades ago thanks to the fracking revolution and the country’s present position as net exporter means that the United States is now a competitor to Opec on world markets, whereas China has become the biggest importer of Gulf hydrocarbons and in particular of Saudi oil.
The realignment of the Gulf States towards a more balanced relationship with Russia, China and other world powers at the expense of its former complete dependency on the United States has this very explanation and justification. Representing 10% of global oil and gas exports, Russia is an essential partner for Saudi Arabia in its management of Opec. Meanwhile, the key role of China as peacemaker between Iran and Saudi Arabia was motivated not merely by China’s ambition to play a greater role on world stage diplomacy, as Freeman’s analysis suggests, but by China’s need to ensure that its suppliers of oil and gas in the Middle East are not forcing it to choose one side and lose the other resentful party as supplier.
Iran’s integration into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and its ever closer relations with both Russia and China were indeed prompted by years of cruel U.S. sanctions and confiscation of its assets. But once Iran turned its back on the U.S., it definitely found compensating economic advantage in its new partners. The North South Transport Corridor, which Freeman mentions in passing, will be a great boon to Iran as well as to Russia and India. Meanwhile, Saudi and other Gulf State prospective capital investments in Iran can have a dramatic positive impact on the Iranian economy.
In a different domain from the dollar issue, Saudi Arabia is about to make a substantial contribution to multipolarity through its candidate membership in BRICS. Saudi Arabia brings to the table its support for the BRICS New Development Bank. Its contribution to the bank’s capital will be an essential guaranty of its viability now that the currency reserves of founding member Russia have been handicapped by U.S. led sanctions.
We have to weigh the relative contributions made to international relations by political elites and leaders on the sea’s surface versus the deeper economic currents which provide the context for the leaders’ actions. We have before us the old question posed by Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace: do leaders like Mohammad bin Salman or Vladimir Putin direct the course of history or do contemporary circumstances, including the will of peoples, determine what leaders can do.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Gilbert Doctorow 
History has a time and tide which waits for no one.god bless those that sail with her and god save those who sail against her.we will shortly see which is which !
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I’ve read that Brazil is opposed to Saudi Arabia joining BRICS. I wonder if there is the prospect of some form of infighting submarining the expansion?
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Freeman seems to have appreciation for Arab & other Muslim-dominated states’ attempts at re-invention on their own terms, but holds out that Israel is a degeneration for not staying close enough to Western ideas. Admittedly it is torn internally in an unprecedented way as demography catches up – those who diminish the centrality of premodern tradition (which Freeman must assume he knows enough about to declare “behavior that dishonors Judaism”), in part because of that, fail to increase their numbers; whereas the traditionalist or traditionalist-supportive “right wing” increases and a tipping point approaches. There may be some justice to some Israelis’ resentment against certain elements now holding sway politically in Israel, for their having taken much less part in creation and development and defence of the modern state (there are of course overlaps, where mutual accommodation may yet prevail). But this must be seen as having been on western-leaning ideological terms. This at root can be said to be the very struggle for self-definition in difficult modern (or hypermodern) context of those who live in Israel. How Freeman can somewhat more generously relate to other West Asian polities, is somewhat telling.
It is good that our host deepens the discussion to include economic drivers. But deeper still lays the matter of resource depletion and profligacy. The “peak” US production in relation to profligacy (plus madly being beholden to ultimately non-productive military production for in important part domestic upkeep, & ever thus today) led not only to monetary change and monetarist policies to hold onto hegemony. The anglosupremacist hegemonists foresaw the eventual decline in superiority in critical easier-to-access resource domination, through depletion of what has been under their control, and the inevitable spread of technological capability re resource extraction among those seen as eventual contributors to hegemonic competition. Thus which countries have been the object of US-led various forms of attack, primarily those relatively still richer in that critical resource, such as Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and of course Russia. (Canada is in their pocket already, Nigeria in its way, too.) And fracking is hardly forever.
If slippage in control of hegemonic basis in the oil/USD way was long foreseen, a replacement scheme was cooked up from around that turning point a half century ago. The replacement relates in their unfolding calendar (possibly for their ends necessarily strict adhesion to which may be part of their undoing) to what transpired of late under covidiana, which I called right from March 2020 “cover for segue into another technomanic financialized system of greater surveillance & control”. If the anglosupreme oil-USD basis is necessarily loosening, change the basis of money altogether. The “blame game” splits referred to by our host in the WION interview just posted, is critical not only re the foisted Ukraine war atrocity. Ahead of the game politically would be developments in Europe, take eg the surging support for the BoerBurgerBeweging in the Netherlands.
Isn’t it “funny” how Freeman focusses at negative length on Israel and its “captives”, but says next to nothing about e.g. Turkey, some 10x more populous & powerful versus its Kurdish “separatists”? Much more can be said to diminish Freeman’s way with things, in terms of depth lack (partly remedied by the economic reference), unexamined assumptions, and disproportionate focus. These remind e.g. of blind spots our host pointed out with a recent widely circulating piece by Mearsheimer.
Freeman deserves diminished praise from our host.
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Apologies, but the US is not a net exporter of oil, and has not been about half a century now. It uses something on the order of 20 million barrels of oil per day, and produces around 12 million barrels of oil per day. The story of the US being a net exporter is oft repeated, but it is simply not true. The US does technically export some finished products, but other than in some small, local markets where the refineries overproduce for that particular local market, the finished products that the US exports were originally imported into the US as crude from abroad. There are people that try to count these exports as US production (of crude), but this is false. They also dishonestly report refinery gains as oil produced (a barrel of crude yields slightly more than a barrel of refined products, depending on the individual feedstock and percentages of finished products-refining lowers density/expands volume). There is also obfuscation where natural gas production is grouped with oil production in BOE (Barrels of Oil Equivalent), and Ethanol production is also often counted, without subtracting the volumes of oil used to produce the Ethanol (there are many studies on this, but using corn as a feedstock, there are very little energy gains for Ethanol production, and this industry mainly exists due to market distortions created by subsidies) US elites/leaders/agencies/corporations have a vested interest in deceiving western audiences on this subject, just as they do most other subjects.
Recent source for current US oil production (and if you were to dig, I’d be willing to bet that this number is dishonestly high as well):
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-crude-output-rise-record-1276-mln-bpd-2023-eia-2023-08-08/
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Obfuscation, “lying” as you might put it, re oil stats, in particular re reserves, has it not been the order of the day for a very long time. Did not OPEC base its earlier anyway pumping volume rights among themselves, on self-estimated reserves, the more you say you have the more you can sell? The Saudi kingpin having less than made out to have, or for technical reasons depleting at a faster rate, is this not at the core of much goings on in “West Asia” (not to mention the grand intro of Sept 11/01)? Its belated attempt at diversification? Its war re Yemen and what lies subsoil near their borderlands? And so on.
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I was addressing US claims. Not anyone else’s.
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