The satellite images tell an old and bitter tale. Miles of thick, black crude are spreading across the warm waters of the Persian Gulf, fouling the pristine beaches of the United Arab Emirates after yet another strike on a commercial tanker. The international press is wringing its hands over the local wildlife and the fragile ecology of the Emirates. The diplomatic corps in Brussels and Washington is doing what it always does: holding urgent briefings, issuing stern communiqués, and calculating the cost of sending another carrier strike group to play crossing guard in a hornets’ nest.
For the working men and women in the hollowed-out mill towns of the Ohio Valley and the refinery hubs of the Gulf Coast, this spectacle ought to provoke a very different reaction. It ought to provoke cold, righteous anger. For half a century, the bipartisan establishment in Washington has operated on the dogma that the United States must exhaust its wealth and risk its soldiers to guarantee the transit of oil through the most treacherous choke points on planet Earth. Every time a missile strikes a hull or a limpet mine detonates near the Strait of Hormuz, the price of crude jumps on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and the working man at the pump gets taken to the cleaners.
Look at the absurdity of the arrangement. The Gulf sheikhdoms possess wealth beyond the dreams of Croesus. They buy up European soccer clubs, bankroll glittering glass towers in the desert, and purchase Manhattan penthouses like ordinary men buy work boots. Yet when the shooting starts and their littoral waters turn into a shooting gallery, who is expected to secure the lanes? The American taxpayer, of course. The Seventh Fleet and the Fifth Fleet are treated by the globalist elite not as the defenders of the American republic, but as an unpaid private security firm for multinational cartels and foreign monarchs.
Meanwhile, back in the American hinterland, the real wealth of this nation is locked underground by bureaucrats and ideological zealots. We sit atop oceans of oil and natural gas in the Permian Basin, the Bakken, and the Marcellus shale. We have the finest roughnecks, pipeliners, and engineers the world has ever seen. Yet under the guidance of our self-appointed betters, we have throttled domestic production, killed off vital pipeline projects, and forced our own industrial base to operate at the mercy of global supply chains vulnerable to every tinpot warlord with a Russian drone or a speed-boat full of explosives.
This is the great betrayal of the economic nationalists. Energy is not a luxury good; it is the fundamental foundation of national sovereignty. Cheap, dependable, abundant energy is the lifeblood of manufacturing. Without it, you cannot melt steel in Pennsylvania, you cannot forge auto parts in Michigan, and you cannot run fertilizer plants in Iowa. By tethering our economic destiny to foreign waters, both the free-trade neoconservatives on the right and the green-transition globalists on the left have left American industry naked to the world.
When an oil spill washes up on the sands of the Persian Gulf, it should not be an invitation for the Pentagon to draw up fresh deployment orders. It should be a glaring, unmistakable warning signal that globalism is a trap. The global sea lanes will never be peaceful so long as ancient tribal and religious animosities simmer in the Middle East. Why should an assembly-line worker in Indiana care which emirate or theocracy controls the tanker traffic off the coast of Fujairah? He cares about the cost of diesel in his truck and the cost of keeping the lights on in his shop.
The remedy is plain, simple, and sitting right under our feet. We must abandon the catastrophic doctrine that demands America police the globe while starving her own industries. Let the oil-rich states of the Gulf build their own navies and protect their own shorelines; they certainly have the cash to do it. The United States must drill its own fields, build its own refineries, and construct its own pipelines from coast to coast.
Until we recover the common sense of national self-reliance, the black sludge washing up on foreign beaches will continue to stain our own balance sheets. It is time to leave the desert wars and the maritime skirmishes to the people who live there, bring our wealth home, and put America’s roughnecks and factory hands back in the driver’s seat of our own destiny.