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***"Make no mistake in understanding what is going on," writes our
Pittsburgh correspondent, Byron King."The Unocal takeover effort is a
test by the Chinese government of U.S. national will. The Chinese have an
energy-based national strategy, and upon it they are acting. You can
disregard this at your peril.
"I hold no animus against China, its people or leaders, nor CNOOC. In
fact, I have admire them all for their worthy level of logical thinking,
their sense of grand strategy, and for their straightforward approach
to international competition. There is nothing inscrutable about what is
going on here. If you understand what you are observing, there is no
subtlety about this event. There is none at all.
"For those who still might not get it, I think that the Chinese may as
well be taking out an a full page ad in the Washington Post, stating,
'We are going to buy up all of your oil and gas. And to accomplish this
task, we're going to use all of those dollars you have been sending us
for the past ten years. And just what are you going to do about it?'
"Yes, just what are we going to do about it? My hope is that the Unocal
takeover competition will be as much of a wake up call to the United
States over its fundamental economic and monetary issues, as was the
Union Oil well blowout in Santa Barbara in 1969, which galvanized the
current environmental movement. If not, the U.S. has only itself to blame."
*** We wondered months ago what China and Japan would do with all the
dollars they were accumulating. They would only hold U.S. Treasuries for
so long, we suggested. Sooner or later, they would want something that
was of real value to them."Natural resources," said Dan Denning at the
time."That's what they need. That's what they'll want."
Now, Dan suggests a possible dark new twist to the world economy: a
"return to the 1930s option." In the '30s, Germany and Japan decided that
natural resources were critical to their national economies. Japan
expanded around the East Rim of the Pacific basin in the name of its
"co-prosperity sphere." Its economy needed resources; it saw nothing wrong
with taking them. Germany, meanwhile, coveted the"lebensraum" of the
East. It intended to make much of Poland and Russian into German-speaking
areas. It also targeted the oil fields of Southeastern Europe.
The sale of U.S. energy assets to China are"perfectly legal under
market capitalism," Dan explains,"but against the national interest. This
is also the"return to the 1930s option" when national imperial
ambitions ran up against the growing demand for scarce resources. National
interests trumped free markets. Wars were fought."
The nationalists argue that oil companies and natural resources are not
what we thought they were. They are not private property; instead, they
belong to the nation. Protecting national assets (even those owned by
individuals) makes no sense in free market terms. But it made sense to
Mussolini. And it is likely to make sense to a lot of Americans as the
absurdities of the U.S. system of imperial finance come to light.
Patrick Buchanan quotes Christopher Lasch:"Whatever its faults,
middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common
frame of reference without which society dissolves into nothing more
than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood
so well - a war of all against all."
"Global free trade is a Faustian bargain," writes Buchanan."A nation
sells its soul for a cornucopia of foreign goods. First the nation gives
up its independence; then its sovereignty, and finally its birthright
-nationhood itself."
We know of no nation that ever lost its soul or its nationhood to free
trade. We know of several that went broke under protectionist regimes.
But neither free trade nor protectionism will save a nation from the
consequences of spending more than it can afford.
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