Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [31]
Less than fifty years ago, there was no aggressor, however bold, that could hope to defeat in battle an America whose supply lines originated in such bounty. From the iron ore and bauxite and phosphate and petroleum reserves came an endless supply of airplane engines and battleships and mortar shells and hand grenades; from the aboriginal fertility of the great plains came food and clothing for as many armies as the nation saw fit to field. Yet by the 1980s the vestiges of this prized autarky were gone and America was as dependent on imports as most of its trading partners. America’s success in World War II had in fact endangered the very resource autarky on which victory rested. The United States drew heavily on its resource banks to acquire global leadership, and would draw even more heavily on them to retain it into the heady years following the war when its relations with the Soviet Union were freezing down at the very moment its domestic economic growth was heating up.
The sharp and sudden deterioration in America’s resource independence produced by this juxtaposition is evident from U.S. bauxite figures. Bauxite is the source of aluminum and a crucial element in industrialization, not least of all in its war-making moment. America was less favorably endowed by nature in bauxite than in other minerals, yet through the end of World War I, America produced nearly 50 percent of the world’s bauxite.6 More important, through 1920 it imported less than 10 percent of its domestic consumption, and at the end of World War II was still producing 57 percent of what it needed.7 Yet within five years (by 1950), imports were up to 65 percent of consumption, with a rapid increase in dependency to 87 percent in 1960, 90 percent in 1980, and 94 percent in 1988.8 Moreover, U.S. bauxite production has continued to plummet as consumption has continued to soar. While in 1945 America was still producing 27 percent of the world’s ore and more than half of what it needed domestically, by 1950 domestic production had dropped to 16 percent of world supply. Ten years later (1960) it was at 7 percent, by 1970 it was half of that (3.4 percent), and in 1989 it was approaching nil—0.5 percent.9
In the fifty years since the end of World War II, then, America has become crucially dependent for the aluminum on which its world leadership is in part based, on the very Third World nations its leadership was meant to subordinate.10 Nearly identical stories can be recounted about other mineral resources as well as about other nations. America’s global rivals, the Common Market and Japan, for example, are 85 to 100 percent dependent on imports for columbium, strontium, manganese, cobalt, tantalum, platinum, chromium, nickel, tin, antimony, iron ore, gold, copper, molybdenum, and phosphate.11 Like America, Europe increasingly depends on potential adversaries for the strategic metals on which its military capacity to confront such adversaries depends.
Although new discoveries of copper, lead, and zinc (as well as aluminum) increased overall world reserves faster than world consumption reduced them through the 1980s, the patterns of production, refining, and distribution have increased dependency for all nations involved in the process—particularly for those like France, Russia, and America that once enjoyed the illusion of autarky. Moreover, as the developable (non-Terminal) Third World evinces a growing First World appetite for consumption to fuel its developing industrialization, global consumption is clearly going to outstrip global production by ever greater margins, increasing the urgency of resource dependency and bringing Malthusian imperatives into dramatic play once again: who