The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [35]
A number of people were taking notes on their BlackBerrys, and I paused to let them catch up, stealing a glance at Alex. He was staring down at his untouched lunch and chewing a cuticle intently. My gut told me I’d been right to suspect Theresa. She’d lied to me. About how she’d got the data, or about why she’d given it to me, or about whether it was genuine. The timing of our meeting was too great a coincidence not to have something to do with this lunch. Maybe she was secretly trying to further Simpson’s candidacy, or maybe she was trying to torpedo him. Either way, I was betting that Alex knew something was wrong. It was why he’d been avoiding me. It hurt to think he might have tried to mislead me.
“If the Hubbert theorists are correct,” I continued, “then Senator Simpson’s right to think that we’re looking at trouble. It’s going to take the United States twenty years—minimum—to transition away from our current energy paradigm, and our economy will be enormously vulnerable in the event of any shortage.”
“Relax,” the guy who’d coughed “bullshit” earlier interjected. “Energy’s a commodity. If we buy less from Nigeria, we buy more from Mexico. It’s just a matter of price.”
“Two observations,” I snapped, annoyed by his ignorant condescension. “First, there are lots of different types of crude oil, and our refining infrastructure is geared to a very particular mix. It’s not that easy to replace Nigerian sweet with Mexican sour. Second, you have to remember that we’re talking about government sellers, and governments aren’t just interested in money. They’re also interested in things like weapons, technology, and political influence. China did a big-guns-for-oil deal with Saudi in 2006. And we’ve already seen an example of exporters clubbing together for political purposes, in 1973, when the Arab nations boycotted the United States and other Western countries because we supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Back then, though, the Arabs didn’t have anywhere else to sell their oil. Things might have turned out a lot worse if China and India had been lifting oil throughout, and if yuan and rupees had been flowing into Arab bank accounts.”
There was a pregnant pause as everyone present digested my argument, and I half regretted having been so forceful. I shouldn’t have let myself be provoked. It was still a low-probability scenario, and I hadn’t figured out what Simpson was advocating as a response.
“Okay, then,” Walter said, addressing himself to Simpson again. “Assume for the moment that you’re right to be concerned. What do you suggest?”
“Let’s start by turning back the clock,” he answered. “Post–World War II, one of America’s biggest strategic imperatives was to secure our oil supply by keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. Six different American presidents saw the need to address the issue. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Carter all affirmed a commitment to military action against the Russians if necessary. Nixon and Reagan extended that policy beyond the Soviet Union, committing us to intervene against any external threat to the region—from China, say, or from India. But as your associate Mr. Wallace has already pointed out, only Nixon faced the kind of problem I’m talking about here today, back when the Arabs boycotted us in 1973. And what was Nixon’s response?”
Simpson looked at me expectantly.
“The Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act—” I began.
“EPAA was a tactical measure,” Simpson interrupted, “intended to deal with the immediate shortage. What strategic action was Nixon contemplating if the boycott hadn’t collapsed when it did?”
“An invasion,” I answered uneasily. “Schlesinger, Nixon’s secretary of defense, told the U.K. ambassador that the United States wasn’t willing to abide threats by ‘underdeveloped, underpopulated’ countries, and that if the embargo didn’t end, America would send troops to seize oil fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. Of course, Nixon was also in the middle of Watergate, and falling