THE US ENERGY SCAM IS SLOW SUICIDE

Vince Dhimos answered a question at Quora.

Why does the US care about the Middle East so much?

Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)

Almost all of the answers and comments to this question so far insist on the old argument that the US interest is in securing the oil or the like.

In terms of energy interests, it is not about securing anything. It is all about keeping the energy prices up so that the US shale oil boondoggle can become profitable. The scary truth is that shale energy — which accounts for most of the touted new jobs — is going broke and needs higher prices to survive. I’m not making this up: As Oil Prices Drop And Money Dries Up, Is The U.S. Shale Boom Going Bust?. Shale energy is going bankrupt. (Just do a search with the terms: us shale going bankrupt).

So, instead of “securing” Middle East reserves, besides demanding that OPEC produce less, the US is trying to block oil producers like Venezuela, Syria and Iran (Iraq could be targeted next) from producing to keep oil scarce and expensive. If you are an American, that is YOUR government hurting your pocketbook deliberately to prop up a pipe dream that is failing. Look, all OPEC + 1 (where the 1 is Russia) would have to do to bring down this scam would be to pull out all the stops and start selling as much oil as they can. The US shale business would be bankrupt in a few months and that would be the end of the dream. And you could afford to buy petrol again.

And that would benefit US energy security because the current rush to pump up all the oil and gas from shale, which requires environmentally harmful and prohibitively expensive fracking, is being depleted even though there is no crisis. If oil prices shoot up sometime in the future, creating a real crisis for the US, then after all the shale energy is depleted by this foolish furious rush to deplete reserves now (to make America look great again), there will be few reserves left for that future crisis! Thus the current oil rush is slow suicide for the US. And it is happening because US officials are politicians seeking votes, not the welfare of their citizens. And they discovered long ago that the best way to garner votes is with scams and frauds bolstered by powerful propaganda and powerful but empty statements by big-mouthed demagogues. It’s a quick solution to their political problem and a quick way to bring down a country. Because democracy does not solve problems, it creates them.

But aside from this scam, the US is not at all interested in supporting the interests of the Middle East. It is only concerned with the interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia, for the reasons I enumerated in another Quora answer:

https://www.quora.com/Which-of-the-USAs-global-interventions-were-purely-well-motivated/answer/Vince-Dhimos

Finally, this failure of US shale oil is a plausible explanation for Trump’s blustery statement “we’re going to take the oil” in Syria. Syrian oil does not require expensive fracking and its sale can be profitable. The only thing Trump forgot is that the US oil companies he is counting on to go and help themselves to this ill-gotten oil do not take risks in unstable regions with a risk of harm to personnel and facilities. You know, the kind that happened at Saudi Aramco.

And they steer clear of legal messes where they could be sued for theft. It's easy for a rogue government with unlimited military might to steal resources, but private companies need to obey the law.