The video footage circulating out of the Arabian Peninsula tells a familiar, miserable story. Black smoke billows from the shattered glass facade of the Aramco Tower in the heart of Riyadh’s financial district, courtesy of yet another long-range strike launched from the badlands of Yemen. Instantly, like Pavlov’s dogs responding to a bell, the imperial apparatus along the Potomac sprang to life. The think-tank clerisy began drafting their white papers, cable news anchors lowered their voices to grave registers, and the usual cabal of defense contractors checked their stock options. The House of Saud had taken a blow, and by the warped logic that has governed Washington for half a century, that means the working men of America are expected to ready their wallets—and perhaps their sons.
Step out of the Georgetown salons and walk through the machine shops of the Mahoning Valley or the rail yards outside Fort Wayne, and ask a simple, unvarnished question: Why should an American pipefitter give a damn about the corporate headquarters of Saudi Aramco? For fifty years, the bipartisan establishment has treated the defense of Gulf monarchies as an article of religious faith. They sold out our domestic industries, shuttered our mills, and told us that a globalized supply chain underwritten by the United States military was the glorious future. Now, as regional tribal conflicts puncture the skyline of Riyadh, the bill for that grand illusion is coming due, and the bipartisan cartel wants to charge it to Main Street.
Let us be brutally clear about who suffers when the Middle East catches fire. It is not the cosmopolitan elites who shuffle paper in Manhattan or lobby on K Street. It is the truck driver paying five dollars a gallon for diesel, the plastics manufacturer in Indiana watching feedstock costs spike overnight, and the foundry operator who cannot plan his quarterly budget because some desert chieftain traded volleys with a drone. High energy prices are a regressive tax on the productive, blue-collar backbone of this country. Every single time a projectile lands near a Persian Gulf pipeline, the margins of American industrial enterprises are squeezed to preserve the profits of international oil syndicates.
The neoconservatives and the liberal internationalists are two wings of the same bankrupt bird. The right-wing hawks will tell you this strike demands American retaliation, more carrier strike groups in the Bab el-Mandeb, and perhaps an all-out confrontation with Iran to keep the world safe for cheap foreign crude. The left-wing globalists will cluck their tongues about international norms and shipping lanes while continuing their domestic crusade to throttle American drilling, choke off pipelines, and bankrupt our coal and refining industries in the name of a green utopia. Both paths lead to the very same ditch: an America that is industrially hollowed out, perpetually overextended abroad, and utterly dependent on foreign despots for its vital lifeblood.
The tragedy of this moment is that it was entirely avoidable. The United States sits atop an ocean of energy that could power our factories and heat our homes for generations without ever begging a foreign monarch for a single barrel. Had we pursued an unabashed policy of economic nationalism—unleashing Texas crude, Pennsylvania natural gas, and Appalachian coal while rebuilding our domestic refining capacity behind protective tariffs—the smoke rising over Riyadh would be nothing more than a curious headline from a distant continent. Instead, our ruling class chose dependency, tethering the fate of our industrial heartland to the most volatile sandbox on earth.
The House of Saud boasts sovereign wealth funds that hold trillions of dollars. They purchase luxury real estate across Europe and buy off professional sports leagues with pocket change. If they cannot defend their own gleaming glass monoliths against ragtag insurgencies, that is their tragedy, not ours. It is high time we abandon the imperial delusion that American workers exist to serve as an unpaid security guard for global oil cartels. Real national security is not found in the skies above Riyadh; it is forged in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, the chemical plants of the Gulf Coast, and the independent power of a republic that owes nothing to foreign powers and produces everything it needs at home.