By Kevin Potvin

It isn’t so much that we are doomed to repeat history for not learning from it, but rather, that if we don’t pick up on the underlying trajectories of history, we’ll remain in a constant state of surprise, alarm and unpreparedness in the face of new events. But that isn’t nearly so Hallmark a phrase, is it.

And they are always new events, never the same events, because history, of course, never does repeat itself, and only the most juvenile scan of history would lead one to think it does. If only public policy-making could be so easy as to just check what happened last time!

The end of one year is the moment to reflect on the past to again attempt to discern the trajectory of history and to therefore try to predict what direction that continuing arc will take in the year ahead.

But it isn’t just one grand arc describing across time the path of history. Just as in the ocean, where there are deep, low frequency movements of massive volumes of water shifting silently around in the dark bottom of the world’s seas, as well as mid-level trade currents, beneath-the-surface waves, and then all the choppiness on the surface from the wind, all making for a complex interplay of patterns, so too will the year ahead take on a path and complexion that is the product of very long term events as well as very immediate sets of causes and effects, and everything in between.

The big ones affect our daily lives as much or more than the small ones, but while the small ones, like the wind rippling the surface of the ocean, are obvious and understood, the big ones that have greater effect, are deep down, never seen, and only poorly understood. While the surface conditions determine whether it will rain today and where, it is the deep ocean currents that determine that there shall be agriculture in Europe and desert in Africa.

While it is somewhat important to figure out if it’s going to rain, it is infinitely more important to figure out if agriculture will continue in Europe. Likewise with historical trends: it may be important to figure out if the BC economy will grow and by how much this year—the eternal preoccupation of all the other newspapers—but it is infinitely more important to figure out if there will be a BC in coming years.

For instance, the American Empire, which is wholly dependent on copious volumes of inexpensive energy for the carrying on of its very existence, may soon come to view BC public resistance to exploitation of offshore oil and gas reserves as an increasingly bothersome inconvenience, and may find local governmental insistence on respecting that public wish increasingly less tolerable, given what the US is committed to doing, and already is doing, to sustain its highly energy-dependent economic empire. A scenario in which the US forcefully takes over, and exploits, BC’s coastal energy reserves—an act that would surely prompt the collapse of government in BC—seems crazy-headed and far-fetched from our current vantage point. But consider the deeper, more slow-moving and invisible historical arcs that have more to do with this bigger kind of event than do the surface ripples we are usually distracted by.

During World War II, the US engaged in an all-out war on two fronts in Europe and Asia. Though many Americans lost their lives, the US war effort was more an industrial and economic one than a boots-on-the-ground one, like it was for most Europeans. The world’s biggest economy was rapidly converted almost completely into a war economy. Tanks, ships, guns, airplanes and ammunition became the focus of a rapidly industrialized and already huge economy. However, it was only possible for the US to arm itself and its allies to the extent necessary to completely change the outcome of the war in both Europe and Asia at the same time because the US, in addition to possessing a massive industrial capacity, like Germany and Japan, also had massive domestic stores of natural resources, and so didn’t need shipping routes for supplies from abroad, as Germany and Japan did. But by the end of the war, so massive had the effort been, that US stores of natural resources were virtually depleted. Copper, magnesium, aluminum, and other crucial industrial resources, at one time in plentiful supply in the US, were all nearly completely used up by 1945.

A perfect storm of conditions then conspired to compel America into the role of a global empire, regardless of whether it was the sole remaining super-power or not, regardless if it was lead by a Democrat or Republican president or Congress, and regardless of threats abroad or at home, imagined or real.

America had become a highly industrialized nation liberally peppered throughout with factories across the land and a massive labour force toiling in them. In 1946, it faced the ominous prospect of hundreds of thousands of newly demobilized men returning home and looking for work—men, it cannot be overlooked, who were young, strong, and full of spit and vinegar, and who knew how to handle guns and were not queasy about killing. From the point of view of the American government, not only was it necessary to keep the factories operating even without any more need of warplanes, warships, guns and ammunition, but it found it also necessary to massively expand an already huge industrial capacity to make jobs for all the demobilized war veterans too. Failure to do so would mean massive unemployment and the social unrest that that brings for a population newly filled with young, seasoned war-fighting veterans, families who sacrificed sons to the good of the nation, and everyone turned on by theories of socialist revolution, having just been primed for three years on propaganda against right-wing corporatist fascists. And this requirement arrived just when the resource cupboard—the necessary ingredients for industrial production—was found to be completely bare.

Thus it was that immediately following World War II, the US national industrial plan was to ensure the flow of crucial natural resources found in mining sites around the world back to humming US factories. This meant US companies needed to expand out to foreign lands drilling and mining under farms and villages, and that shipping companies needed to move cargos of minerals and chemicals through ocean passages around the globe back to US ports. This is the origin of the globally-projected US military, meant to protect resource extraction sites and to guard shipping routes.

When the US consumer market eventually proved unable to continue absorbing all the goods produced by US factories, new consumer markets were required to buy up the excess production; hence the “democratizing” and “liberating” efforts of the US military in the 60s and 70s, meant to open new markets to US-produced goods. When US companies could no longer deploy all their accumulated capital domestically, new investment markets were required; hence the globalization of the 80s and 90s, to open up new flows of foreign investment and new labour markets to put to work with it.

Energy, and in particular, highly portable fossil-fuel energy in the form of oil and gas, has since emerged not only as the highest priority industrial commodity, necessary to farming, chemical, and manufacturing industries, but it also became the chief consumer commodity necessary to all personal travel, even between home and school, work, and shopping for virtually all 300 million Americans. Should US access to sources of overseas oil and gas be cut off, as it was for Japan in 1939 or for Germany in 1944, not only would there be rapid closures of factories and farms in America, but also, there would be massive social turbulence too, since citizens would be cut off from virtually all their necessary daily activities.

It may be that for the time being, oil and gas are freely and globally traded commodities, and that it’s senseless to speak of access being cut off for anyone so long as that country has money to pay. But that only remains the case so long as the post-World War II global economic trading system remains in place—a system invented by the US and sustained by globally-projected US military power and globally-desired US currency. If relative US military power declines or the US dollar suffers a steep drop in relative value, the post-WWII economic system could well collapse, leaving energy no longer a freely traded market commodity, but once again a strategically hoarded source of power. The US economy, as leading importer of energy, is more vulnerable than any other nation to this potential reality.

Given the historically high stakes, and given how necessary it now is for America to retain access to secure sources of overseas energy, how likely is it that Washington would respect Victoria’s decision to continue denying exploitation of off-shore oil and gas reserves, if and when the world security situation for Americans tightens to the point where energy flows to US companies and consumers can no longer be assured? If military provocation with Iran, for example, leads Iran to sink just one ship in the Straights of Hormuz, thereby completely closing the Persian Gulf shipping passage to oil tanker traffic, which would immediately shut down about 25% of global oil delivery overnight, would BC public desires to retain the moratorium against oil and gas drilling off the coast be respected?

Noting the ferocity of threats leveled at new US friend Pakistan to assure that country’s cooperation with US plans for war on Afghanistan, as recently revealed by Pakistani president Musharaf, and given threats to long-time allies Germany and France to secure acquiescence to US plans for war on Iraq (also formally a close friend), there is little reason to suppose a recalcitrant BC government would be treated differently if it rejected US access to offshore fields. Noting the Canadian government response to BC’s closing of US access to the Nanoose Bay torpedo range in 1999, by expropriating the region and reassuring Washington it would never again lose access, we can be pretty sure that diplomatic contact between Ottawa and Washington would assure US access to BC offshore oil and gas reserves, no matter what the BC government says or does. It is utterly conceivable, and totally in line with the historical trajectory of US deployments of military power, to imagine that Ottawa’s lack of cooperation in putting down a BC revolt on constitutional grounds would be met with rapid deployment of US forces to BC, if not Ottawa as well, and the whole nation in between.

Naturally, government leaders in Ottawa and Victoria would be offered a hard look at the equations and given a chance to choose to acquiesce to US demands to open up BC coastal energy fields to exploitation, sending out statements to the public extolling the virtues of foreign investment, jobs, and energy industry development, and downplaying the risks of environmental catastrophe on the coast—and not mentioning, at least until death-bed memoirs, the US threats of governmental annihilation for failure to allow access.

It’s a farfetched scenario, I totally agree, but only if we focus strictly on the surface ripples in the daily papers. But it’s clear we really are only one sunken ship in the Straights of Hormuz away from this potential scenario, if we peer hard and deep instead into the deeper ocean currents that really direct the ebbs and flows of national and provincial histories. Should the scenario described here come to pass, however unlikely, it would be better were we at least forewarned and somewhat prepared. Instead, the newspapers and “leaked” government studies appearing at the end of the year “warn” us that BC trade with Asia will “explode” 50% over the next 15 years, so long as we invest billions of public funds in infrastructure. The figure is really an unimpressive 2.7% per year, and probably not much different from what it would be if we cancelled the whole Pacific Gateway project. As far as the risks facing us in reality are concerned, both government and media are mute.

You decide how much it's worth to you: