National Interest Online | Inside Track: Pole Dancing

. . . Next to speak was Flynt Leverett of the New America Foundation, who focused on the economic foundation of the world without the West: developing countries are nationalizing their natural resources and converting them into political leverage, with startling success. Leverett maintained that the dramatic increase in energy prices since 2000 tips the geopolitical scales in the direction of oil-and-gas producing powers. The “strategic consequence” of these developments is a huge redistribution of wealth and economic power. Energy exporters like the GCC states and Russia gain; other beneficiaries include manufacturing powerhouses like China, Germany and Japan. Most ominously, the losers from high energy prices—the United States, Great Britain and the European Union—are ringing up large current-account deficits, putting them at the mercy of China and the energy exporters who finance their fiscal shortfalls.

Like Gvosdev and Weber, Leverett saw a huge disconnect between the foreign-policy rhetoric of the U.S. presidential candidates and the actual situation, going so far as to say that Obama, Clinton and McCain must be talking about “some other planet.” . . .