EUROPE & AMERICA: VISCERAL ANTI-AMERICANISM - May 17, 2009

For those who understand the truly undemocratic nature of the European Union socialist ‘experiment’ and  the EU’s explicit, inferiority-complex-driven anti-Americanism,  it remains a mystery why every US president from Reagan to Clinton to Bushes 41 and 43 have supported European integration.  Perhaps it is American innocence, bordering on naiveté, failing to grasp that EU is an attempt to enforce a ‘top-down’ federation by a centralizing political elite working to eclipse state sovereignties. By contrast, the United States was from inception a voluntary ‘grassroots up’ federation that sought actively to protect state rights.  

However, in the United States the president is still accountable not only to the two legislative Houses but also directly to the American electorate, the people.  A bad US administration can always be shown the door after four years. A bad EU Commission is an immovable object. The EU, for decades has still to provide its people with a single legal set of audited accounts let alone accountability. Politically, socially, economically and philosophically Europe and America are divided by far more than just the Atlantic.

BRAND EUROPE v. BRAND AMERICA

America’s global ‘brand’, its superpower status, military and economic power, its political influence,  it’s  very reputation as the’ land of the free’ where anyone, even the son of an immigrant African goat-herder, can become President stands as a withering reproach to ‘brand’ Europe. As an aside, what are the chances for a British Pakistani, a French Algerian or a German Turk to reach the highest office of those lands?

Among European government elites, reinforced by fake illusions of parity among nations, the United States, Russia but also Myanmar and Botswana are all equal nations. They seem not see that millions of people around the world would love to become Americans but not very many would like to become Russians. If anything, the not so secret hope has been to cut America down in size. Obama’s adulation in Europe has not been based on the man’s considerable abilities and persona. Instead, his race, the religious background of his father and even his pastor’s rants, all are part of a hardly disguised wishful thinking of lessening America. Democrats in the USA and Bush’s haters should think twice in interpreting European support of Obama as similar to their own reasons for their recent voting.

Allegations of climate apocalypse has, so European politicians claim, further revealed that US global hegemony has come at a price – for Europe and the rest of the world.  Europe has been at the forefront in blaming America for the world’s climate woes. America is, so the EU political rhetoric runs, primarily responsible for causing global warming by virtue of being the world’s leading energy consumer and ‘carbon polluter’. Thus America should take a lead in changing its fossil fuel consuming ways, clean up ‘Dodge City’ and the rest of the world – oh yes, and foot the bill for the global clean-up.

At time of writing, EU leaders have declared they will be paying an early visit to President Obama in Washington with exactly that bald proposal.  What the EU wants is for the US and other countries, but particularly the US, to adopt a carbon trading scheme for businesses similar to its own European Trading Scheme (ETS) – a massive green tax on businesses, as a penance for its climate ‘crimes against humanity’. Yet the ETS, along with other carbon cap and trade schemes, has been widely discredited with the EU itself providing all manner of escape clauses for European energy and heavy industries.

As we have written elsewhere: “Energy is the world’s most important commodity. Period. Without energy, there is no transportation. And without transportation, there is no commerce. Energy supply, energy consumption, and energy politics are driving the global political, economic, and social debate and will continue to do so for decades to come.” Bottom line? Energy is the key commodity that drives Western civilization as we know it. Indeed, energy use, via the industrial revolution, both formed and defined it.

However, it is here that we can grasp that European politicians are laboring under some severe geopolitical misapprehensions.  EU leaders plainly believe that US global hegemony has been built on the back of an over-exploitation of the world’s ‘dwindling’ energy resources, given that America is the world’s highest per capita energy consumer. This in turn led the US to become a leading carbon ‘polluter’ which threatens the very future of the planet.  But, the simple fact is, the world’s energy reserves, including oil and, particularly, gas, are far from ‘dwindling’. Peak Oil alarmists have been moving the ‘end is nigh’ goalposts over oil running out for at least 150 years. True enough, the age of easy access oil and gas is over.   But the age of plentiful deepwater, harder to reach and formerly uneconomic reserves is just getting under way.  In Battle for Barrels: Peak Oil Myths & World Oil Futures, Duncan Clarke cites Leonardo Maugeri  of Italy’s “world class company, Eni” as estimating that “2 trillion barrels of unclassified recoverable reserves will become commercially exploitable.” Clarke quotes Maugheri as saying, “only 30 percent of known basins in the world now produce oil and gas ... and another 30 percent is still to be explored.”   As ‘peak oil alarmism’ debunkers Peter Huber and Mark Mills say in The Bottomless Well, “Energy supplies are – for all practical purposes – infinite.” In short, fallacy no 1 is that the US profligacy is fast-using up the world’s energy resources. 

Further, we note that EU hypocrisy has, at the end of 2008, led to the formulation of its own Arctic policy in a bid to enable it to muscle in on the current international grab for the Arctic’s hydrocarbon-rich reserves. The EU appears to have little faith in its renewables energy policies and goals, not to mention the massive public subsidies it is pouring into them.  Clearly the EU wants its own hydrocarbon ‘insurance policy’ in place.

Most significantly however, as we have written in The Color of Oil, “Demand for energy does not result from wealth”, rather, “it promotes and generates wealth.” This is a key understanding.  It is the pursuit of wealth creation – that to which all developing nations aspire – that requires increasing energy consumption.  America is just the current leading example of how that can be achieved.  Is that not what Europe wants too? Is that not the path of poverty-eradication to which all fast-industrializing economies, like China and India, aspire?  Do we really expect these nations to rely on the currently expensive and failing renewable revolution? To turn their back on coal and other hydrocarbon use – just to please Western ‘green’ armchair ideologues already enjoying the fruits of a modern hydrocarbon fuelled modern civilization? The truth is, when it comes to defining the ‘wealth of nations’, as The Color of Oil states: “The energy wealth and poverty of nations has replaced industrialization as the defining factor.  A robust economy is marked by very large per capita energy consumption.”  In short, high energy consumption, in advanced Western societies that counter poverty and promote wealth, like America, high energy consumption is the very gateway to the ‘American Dream’, the dream to which, in the real world, all societies aspire.

WHY EUROPE REALLY DESPISES AMERICA

Europe’s relentless criticism of America is not about the smoke and mirrors of ‘foreign policy’ disagreements.  Europe’s hypocritical post-WW2 antipathy toward America begins with belief that greater European unity is what kept the Cold War peace in war-torn Europe. There is little acknowledgement that American military might in the form of 100,000 US troops posted in Germany and beyond achieved that.  But American military might – yet another fruit of the American capitalist system – has always rankled with Europe, especially France. But whether it is French antipathy toward a US-dominated NATO military, the continual refusal of key European states to fulfil their own NATO commitments to actually fight the enemy as in Afghanistan all endemic in the European socialist worldview, as The Economist editors Micklethwait and Wooldridge, making the point that America, both Right and Left together, is more conservative than socialist Europe, say in The Right Nation, “At the moment, Europe is a freeloader on American military might.” 

The Eurocrat political pretences on the issues of energy and climate aside, we are faced with the stark reality: that European antipathy towards modern America is rooted deep in old-fashioned, envy. Stripping away the rhetoric, what we are left with is the a simmering resentment that an ‘all-powerful’ US has stolen Europe’s ‘rightful’ place, status and influence in the modern world.  

As a new, more socialist-minded US president takes office, far from the rationale of many of his voters for a social agenda in the US, many EU leaders and EU elites undoubtedly see an unexpected opportunity for the American eagle to agree to have its wings clipped.  President Obama, however, would do well to consider what makes the eagle majestic is its very ability to soar free.

Michael J. Economides and Peter C. Glover

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Michael J. Economides is a professor at the University of Houston, author of "The Color of Oil", editor-in-chief at Energy Tribune and a regular political and energy analyst for the U.S. media.    

Peter C. Glover is a British writer specializing in political, energy and climate issues. He is European Associate Editor at Energy Tribune and author of "The Politics of Faith: Essays on the morality of key current affairs."

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