With its rapidly reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the U.S. has little reason to stay on in the region — a looming problem for India
In coming years, India will become evermore dependent on oil from an evermore troubled region.
“Ten years from now”, the man who founded OPEC told a young graduate student during a 1976 interview, “twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin”. India's strategic community ought to reflect on those words: little-noticed but seismic shifts in oil geopolitics mean the country is staring at a strategic challenge of a magnitude it is utterly unprepared for.
From a peak of more than five billion barrels in 2005, the United States' crude oil and refined products imports fell to 4.14 billion barrels last year [See Table 1]. Imports from Saudi Arabia and the volatile Persian Gulf have been in slow but steady decline for years. In 2011, over 23 per cent of all U.S. crude oil and refined products came from Canada — over twice as much as from Saudi Arabia, six times as much as Iraq and 20 times as much as Libya. If a $7-billion pipeline linking Canada's oilfields to refiners in the U.S. passes environmental hurdles, the country could even end up being a net exporter of oil.
In time, the U.S. might draw back from the Middle East on this receding tide of oil — a nightmare for India and other growing Asian powers. Ever since 1947, the U.S. has used guns and cash to impose order across the Middle East. Now, India could be left needing evermore oil from a region that is ever-less stable. India, like China, has watched helplessly as Western-led policies in the Middle East have led oil-producing Iraq and Libya into quasi-anarchy. Iran's nuclear programme could, conceivably, spark-off murderous regional confrontation.
Emerging, oil-thirsty Asia, the United States Energy Information Administration has estimated, will be consuming some 33.6 million barrels per day [mpd] of oil by 2025 — more than double its demand at the turn of the century. It won't be able to get it, though, without order in the Middle East. For India, there is another peril. Indian policies on Pakistan have long rested on the assumption that the U.S. would push its troublesome ally away from the brink. The reason the U.S. locked itself into an alliance with Pakistan in the first place, though, was to protect the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia — and the future, could care less about regional security.
The unstable petro-state
OPEC's founder, Juan Peréz Alfonzo, had warned of oil's exceptionally toxic political properties back in 1976: “we are drowning”, he famously said, “in the Devil's Excrement”. The petro-states on which growing economies like India rely to fuel their search for prosperity, he had realised, simply cannot be stable. In the mid-1970s, when Mr. Alfonzo had made his dark prophecy about ruin to scholar Terry Lynn Karl, the corrosive character of the Devil's Excrement was little understood. Instead, it appeared to have made the ruler of every petro-state a Midas. The Shah of Iran promised his people a “great civilisation”; Carlos Andrés Pérez, Venezuela's President, imagined a future where “Americans will be driving cars built by our workers in our modern factories”.