You remember. It was the oiliest of administrations. The president was a (failed) West Texas oilman. The vice-president had been the CEO of the giant oil field services company, Halliburton, and before taking office, when speaking at the Petroleum Institute and elsewhere, was known to say things like, "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, long on the board of Chevron, had a double-hulled oil tanker named for her. They were a crew with the global flow of oil and how to control it on the brain. Just in case you forgot, and I know you haven't, the new vice president had barely taken office and set up an "energy task force" to develop future policy that he himself would chair when a parade of top oil executives began arriving at the White House to meet secretly with it.
And then, after 9/11, came the assault on the oil heartlands of the planet. I'm sure you remember how, amid the chaos of a burning Baghdad, American troops were ordered to guard only the buildings of Iraq's Oil and Interior Ministries, and... well, I don't really have to review all of that for you, do I? Then, of course, Americans put into office the guy who swore he was going to end oil wars and attend to our global warming future instead -- a fellow named Barack Obama who, everyone knew, would step into office without an oil slick in his head.
That was then and this is now. The Barack Obama of 2014 is essentially running a drill-baby-drill White House in a country where oil consumption is actually rising. His administration has been opening up ever more coastal areas to exploration and drilling from the East to the Arctic waters of Alaska, while encouraging the creation of a "Saudi America" in the American frack lands. The result: a torrent of crude oil and natural gas and something else as well, as Michael Klare points out today in "Obama's New Oil Wars." Buoyed by the country's boom in energy wealth, our president has been putting oil to work abroad. He has been using energy as the spear of his already highly militarized foreign policy. The result has been a sophisticated weaponization of oil that puts the energy mavens of the Bush administration to shame. But let Klare tell you the whole grim tale.