April 22, 2018

The recent bombing of Syria by the U.S., Great Britain and France raised a veritable labyrinth of questions. The purported justification for it was the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian armed forces against civilians in Douma, a rebel-held town on the verge of surrendering to the Syrian Army. Under the circumstances, it’s difficult to imagine how the regime would have benefited militarily from such an attack. Ironically, it may have helped the Russians fine tune their S-400s to track cruise missiles and planes in actual combat -invaluable experience.

The Players
The Syrian civil war is the result of a long simmering socio-political dissatisfaction amplified by drought and its consequences. Now it has evolved into a chaotic struggle where Sunni and Shia militias –backed respectively by the U.S., and its allies and Russia and its allies- fight each other as well as the Assad regime. The wildcard in all this is Israel, America’s closest ally. It reserves the right to violate Syrian airspace and take any military action at any time to prevent Iran from entrenching itself or deploying sophisticated weaponry in Syria capable of destroying Israel. Syria is a powder keg. All it needs is a spark and it will go off.

The Fracture
Looking at it from a global perspective, the de facto frontline between NATO and Russia running from St. Petersburg to the Black Sea closely resembles the Russo-German front in June 1942, with some important differences: NATO has not (yet) ingested Byelorussia; the antagonists have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over; Iran, no longer controlled by Britain or the U.S., has the capacity to destroy Saudi oil terminals and to block, at least temporarily, the Strait of Hormuz; and China, the largest economy in Asia and with a population four times larger than the U.S., is rapidly acquiring the capacity to challenge America’s control of the South China Sea and beyond.

Oil: The Bone of Contention
While consumer nations –among them the European Union, China and India- rely on oil for their everyday needs, for financial reasons the United States depends on it even more. The lifeblood of the American economy is the petrodollar, a fiat currency that allows the U.S. to “print” virtually unlimited amounts of money, incur perpetual budget deficits with impunity, and support a “defense” budget larger than the next ten nations combined. No other nation enjoys this privilege. As it now stands, the addiction to fossil fuels trumps the overwhelming litany of warnings from the scientific community about climate change and its consequences. The addiction is so strong that the plutocrats and oligarchs that run the world are willing to risk a terminal conflagration, if necessary, to perpetuate their oil-based wealth and power.

The End Game
According to the United Nations, the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050. That’s an increase of 2.2 billion in 32 years. If nothing is done, by that time the water crisis -already severe in many parts of the world including the Ogallala region in the Great Plains, central California, India and China- will have reached catastrophic dimensions. The winds of famine, disease, war, and an untold number of refugees are on the horizon, and our leaders have not yet mustered the political courage to reverse the suicidal course they’ve put us on. They must coordinate efforts to replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission with hydrogen to generate electricity and manufacture the water the world will need to feed itself.