Wednesday, March 18, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The new
silk roads
A few summers ago,
while lounging around the
Munich Airport waiting
for a flight to Reykjavik, I
bought a book: <The Silk
Roads: A New History of the
World,= by Peter Frankopan.
Frankopan is a senior fel-
low at Oxford University,
and has written a convincing
reassessment of world his-
tory. It is also a poignant and
extraordinarily well-consid-
ered forecast of our possible
future as a broader, Western
culture.
It9s a good enough read
that, while spending the
weekend moving horse
manure from one spot
to another on one of the
last American-made trac-
tors, I kept coming back to
Frankopan9s ultimate con-
clusion: that what we are
witnessing today, in the
realms of business and geo-
politics and the obvious
confusion and impotence of
Western foreign policy, is a
dramatic shift in the center
of gravity, a return of power
to the places it resided for
thousands of years 4 the
ancient kingdoms and cul-
tures along the old Silk
Roads.
From China to Ukraine,
from Russia to Iran, from
Uzbekistan to Kygyrzstan,
a new center of power,
anchored by the availability
and abundance of natural
resources, the home-grown
ability and willingness to
exploit them 4 and with
a military parity with the
global powers not seen since
the collapse of the Ottomans
4 is poised to reassert itself.
I would argue that power
is already reasserting itself,
and has been since the
Iranian revolution and the
fall of the Shah.
I don9t know what this
dramatic shift, which I
believe is real 4 and which
we can read in the tea-leaves
of the world9s headlines
every day 4 portends. I
doubt it is good, at least for
those of us who have grown
accustomed to the ease and
convenience of modern
Western living.
Which is, if we are being
honest, all of us.
We have grown accus-
tomed to having most
everything we want, when
we want it, and we could
afford that luxurious way of
thinking because 4 for bet-
ter or for worse 4 we con-
trolled the resources and the
energy, and backed that con-
trol with unparalleled mili-
tary might.
Not so, anymore. In
regions of the world that may
well dominate the future,
and how we live in that
future, we have wildly, and
repeatedly, misplayed our
hand. We have misplayed
it so badly, and so often 4
from Kiev to Beijing 4 we
risk becoming entirely irrel-
evant as a respectable player,
incapable of supporting our
own interests, and held in
perpetual contempt and dis-
dain by entire regions of
people who consider us liars
and thieves.
Sadly, at this point, it
doesn9t even matter if they9re
right or if they9re wrong.
At home, we are engaged
in endless bouts of moraliz-
ing about energy consump-
tion, even as we arrive at
the latest protest du jour in
our SUVs and $300 puffy
jackets, weighted down with
laptops and cellphones. It9s
no accident of irony that pro-
testors of the Dakota Access
pipeline left behind 24,000
tons of trash, mountains of
human waste, dogs, pup-
pies, cars, and dozens upon
dozens of propane tanks.
Law enforcement officers
were even monitoring the
garbage collection on the
chance there might be dead
humans hidden in the refuse.
That9s not an unplanned mis-
fortune, excusable because
the motives were sound:
it9s exactly who we have
become, a kind of cultural
split-personality, duplicitous
to the point of absurdity.
Consider this: the proven
crude reserves under the
Caspian Sea are twice those
of the entire United States.
The Karachaganak reserve
between Kazakhstan and
Russia contains an esti-
mated 42 trillion cubic feet
of natural gas, liquefied gas,
and crude oil. The Donbas
basin in eastern Ukraine has
10 billion tons of extract-
able coal deposits, as well
as 1.4 billion barrels of oil,
2.4 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas, and the earth
itself in southern Ukraine
is so rich they dig it up and
sell it to the tune of a bil-
lion a year. The Uzbek and
Kyrgyz mines of the Tian
Shan belt are second only to
the Witwatersrand basin in
gold deposits. In Kazakhstan
are beryllium, dysprosium,
and other rare-earth metals
vital for the manufacture
of mobile phones, laptops,
and rechargeable batteries
4 not to mention uranium
and plutonium for nuclear
warheads.
There isn9t a well-mean-
ing environmental protest
in the world that is going to
stop those countries from
exploiting their resources,
growing tremendously
wealthy from the pursuit,
and wielding the fruits as
both hard and soft power in
the Great Game. And, dis-
turbingly, they aren9t likely
to have even the remotest
hint of democratic institu-
tions in place to restrain their
considerable ambitions.
Like it or not, the real his-
tory of the world has always
been, and always will be,
about resources.
Last year, in my favorite
outback bar in Nevada, I
saw a sign hanging over the
ranks of bourbon and rye on
a dusty shelf. The sign read:
<If it doesn9t grow, it has
to be mined.= The sign was
printed as a kind of sad pro-
test, and pasted up by a dis-
gruntled someone who was
about to lose his job at the
gypsum mine.
It didn9t matter that the
statement happens to be true,
because truth in the 21st cen-
tury has become increasingly
obscure and elusive. And it
didn9t help either, because
the more pressing and indis-
putable fact remained that he
was losing his livelihood to
someone on the other side
of the world, to some other
miner, in the heart of the
New Silk Roads.
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