According to the elite newspapers and journals of
opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus
for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates
and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism
alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other
words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral
theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed
us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter
greatly.
But there is another truth: The reality of large,
impersonal forces like geography and the environment that also help to
determine the future of human events. Africa has historically been poor largely
because of few good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior
to the coast. Russia is paranoid because its land mass is exposed to invasion
with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy
not because of ideas but because of large energy deposits underground. You get
the point. Intellectuals concentrate on what they can change, but we are
helpless to change much of what happens.
Enter shale, a sedimentary rock within which natural
gas can be trapped. Shale gas constitutes a new source of extractable energy
for the post-industrial world. Countries that have considerable shale deposits
will be better placed in the 21st century competition between states, and those
without such deposits will be worse off. Ideas will matter little in this
regard.
So let's look at who has shale and how that may change
geopolitics. For the future will be heavily influenced by what lies
underground.
The United States, it turns out, has vast deposits of
shale gas: in Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and
elsewhere. America, regardless of many of the political choices it makes, is
poised to be an energy giant of the 21st century. In particular, the Gulf
Coast, centered on Texas and Louisiana, has embarked upon a shale gas and tight
oil boom. That development will make the Caribbean an economic focal point of
the Western Hemisphere, encouraged further by the 2014 widening of the Panama
Canal. At the same time, cooperation between Texas and adjacent Mexico will
intensify, as Mexico increasingly becomes a market for shale gas, with its own
exploited shale basins near its northern border.
This is, in part, troubling news for Russia. Russia is
currently the energy giant of Europe, exporting natural gas westward in great
quantities, providing Moscow with political leverage all over Central and
particularly Eastern Europe. However, Russia's reserves are often in parts of
Siberia that are hard and expensive to exploit -- though Russia's extraction
technology, once old, has been considerably modernized. And Russia for the
moment may face relatively little competition in Europe. But what if in the
future the United States were able to export shale gas to Europe at a
competitive price?
The United States still has few capabilities to export
shale gas to Europe. It would have to build new liquefaction facilities to do
that; in other words, it would have to erect plants on the Gulf of Mexico that
convert the gas into liquid so that it could be transported by ship across the
Atlantic, where more liquefaction facilities there would reconvert it back into
gas. This is doable with capital investment, expertise and favorable
legislation. Countries that build such facilities will have more energy
options, to export or import, whatever the case may be. So imagine a future in
which the United States exports liquefied shale gas to Europe, reducing the
dependence that European countries have on Russian energy. The geopolitics of
Europe could shift somewhat. Natural gas might become less of a political tool
for Russia and more of a purely economic one (though even such a not-so-subtle
shift would require significant exports of shale gas from North America to
Europe).
Less dependence on Russia would allow the vision of a
truly independent, culturally vibrant Central and Eastern Europe to fully
prosper -- an ideal of the region's intellectuals for centuries, even as ideas
in this case would have little to do with it.
This might especially be relevant to Poland. For
Poland may have significant deposits of shale gas. Were Polish shale deposits
to prove the largest in Europe (a very big "if"), Poland could become
more of an energy producer in its own right, turning this flat country with no
natural defenses to the east and west -- annihilated by both Germany and the
Soviet Union in the 20th century -- into a pivot state or midlevel power in the
21st. The United States, in turn, somewhat liberated from Middle East oil
because of its own energy sources (including natural gas finds), could focus on
building up Poland as a friendly power, even as it loses substantial interest
in Saudi Arabia. To be sure, the immense deposits of oil and natural gas in the
Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran will keep the Middle East a major energy
exporter for decades. But the shale gas revolution will complicate the world's
hydrocarbon supply and allocation, so that the Middle East may lose some of its
primacy.
It turns out that Australia also has large new natural
gas deposits that, with liquefaction facilities, could turn it into a principal
energy exporter to East Asia, assuming Australia significantly lowers its cost
of production (which may prove very hard to do). Because Australia is already
starting to emerge as the most dependable military ally of the United States in
the Anglosphere, the alliance of these two great energy producers of the future
could further cement Western influence in Asia. The United States and Australia
would divide up the world: after a fashion, of course. Indeed, if
unconventional natural gas exploitation has anything to do with it, the
so-called post-American world would be anything but.
The geopolitical emergence of Canada -- again, the
result of natural gas and oil -- could amplify this trend. Canada has immense
natural gas deposits in Alberta, which could possibly be transported by future
pipelines to British Columbia, where, with liquefaction facilities, it could
then be exported to East Asia. Meanwhile, eastern Canada could be the
beneficiary of new shale gas deposits that reach across the border into the
northeastern United States. Thus, new energy discoveries would bind the two
North American countries closer, even as North America and Australia become
more powerful on the world scene.
China also has significant deposits of shale gas in
its interior provinces. Because Beijing is burdened by relatively few
regulations, the regime could acquire the land and build the infrastructure
necessary for its exploitation. This would ease somewhat China's energy crunch
and aid Beijing's strategy to compensate for the decline of its
coastal-oriented economic model by spurring development inland.
The countries that might conceivably suffer on account
of a shale gas revolution would be landlocked, politically unstable oil producers
such as Chad, Sudan and South Sudan, whose hydrocarbons could become relatively
less valuable as these other energy sources come online. China, especially,
might in the future lose interest in the energy deposits in such low-end,
high-risk countries if shale gas became plentiful in its own interior.
In general, the coming of shale gas will magnify the
importance of geography. Which countries have shale underground and which don't
will help determine power relationships. And because shale gas can be transported
across oceans in liquid form, states with coastlines will have the advantage.
The world will be smaller because of unconventional gas extraction technology,
but that only increases the preciousness of geography, rather than decreases
it.
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