Warmongering Street Journal: Why the U.S. Should Remain Protector of World Oil Flows

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Wall Street Journal yet again attempting to paint Trump into an awkward corner, into an "impossible to win" situation.  

WSJ suggesting never-ending, global, military actions led by the U.S.

Insanity.  This is the epitome of the Military Industrial Complex.

 

Note: you will probably run into a paywall, so try copying & pasting the first sentence into Google.

WSJ: Why the U.S. Should Remain Protector of World Oil Flows

"As tensions with Iran began escalating last month, President Trump made a startling statement: The U.S. shouldn’t be bearing the burden of protecting the flow of oil tankers past Iranian waters and through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the principal assignments the U.S. has accepted for the last four decades.

Instead, he said, China and Japan depend far more on Persian Gulf oil than does the U.S. these days, so they should protect their own ships. “We don’t even need to be there in that the U.S. has just become (by far) the largest producer of Energy anywhere in the world!” the president tweeted.

 

... In response, Mr. Trump was asking, essentially: Why should we care, if we don’t need your region’s oil as much as we used to? It is a question that seems at once both reckless and perfectly reasonable—one a lot of Americans probably are asking themselves.

Yet the question also serves as notice that political leaders regularly need to remind Americans, and perhaps themselves, why they benefit from assuming the kind of world leadership role that includes protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf.

 

... Oil is the ultimate fungible global product. If the price goes up for somebody because of a supply disruption, it goes up for everybody. The origin of the barrel of oil from which your gallon of gas is derived doesn’t really matter much in determining how much it costs. If there is a global shortfall, everybody pays the price, literally.

In that global marketplace, the Strait of Hormuz isn’t quite as important as it once was, but it is still very important. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that 21 million barrels of oil a day flowed through the Strait last year, or about 21% of the world’s total consumption.

 

... So the right question isn’t whether the U.S. should protect the flow of oil, but how. 

“We should ask our allies to do more to help in defending the Gulf,” Mr. Burns says. 

“They are more likely to do so if we lead and organize the coalitions, given our undisputed power and our leadership of the democratic world…. 

The lesson for President Trump is that allies and even competitors like China will join us if we lead and work alongside them rather than demand they do the job without us.