SA floods the market with cheap oil to keep us happy because oil is their only economic value.

That's why they recently went into debt.

They have everything to lose and we have everything to gain by leaving the middle east and procuring our own oil

They draw their budgets based on oil being over $100/bbl. When that happened, we out produced them.

SA is flooding the market (well maybe *was* now) because they have a lower lifting cost. It was economic warfare against Iran.

It was against the US and Russia while you're joking.

We are more than capable of doing so, your entire argument of "well you import so prices will affect you" doesnt hold water outside the short term, if we truly were to spool up our industry we would be the oil power of the world.

Sorry, I must not have been clear. We leave the middle east. that's it. pass go and collect the vast reinvestment in domestic prosperity.

Our reserves are meant for us to keep up domestic use AND fight a war at the same time

Look up top producers of oil over the last 20 years. Notice that after the US become the #1 producer that SA flooded the market.

We may see a slight bump in price in the short term but it wont last and we certainly wont be as negstively affected as the UK, we learned our lesson in the 70s we prepare for these kinds of things.

See when it got high enough for us to start doing shale we did shale and we got *good at it*. We went from bore drilling to pad drilling to multipad drilling. We went from seismic to 3D then 4D seismic. The current lifting costs are half what they were when we started.

And because the SuperMajors are not the only players anymore any rise in price makes a whole host of operators economically viable.

Exactly @Jym.. We will survive the whole thing because our economy absorbs these bumps, and when we can make more profit at things, then we expand technologies making them even more efficient. I don't buy the fear of a price increase, because it will transform the economy, and those price spikes, and eventual moderate growth of inflation is what a strong economy exhibit. Part of the problem we have had over the last 30 years is the drive to internationalism has driven prices down, damn the worker.

That by definition is deflationary, and is what drives economies into depression.

We could collapse the entire middle easts economy if we felt like it

Not that they need our help

I'm not so sure we shouldn't, except that is how OBL was so damn effective at recruitment for his Jihadi movement.

I wouldn

Internationalism doesn't really come into this. The high prices earlier in this century created a demand that resulted in a whole technological revolution in this country. That cannot be undone. And so whatever we previously considered the dynamics of the energy industry to be that has now been permanently changed.

I wouldn't advocate for us to militarily get involved over there any more. THAT doesn't make any sense.

It really does. Oil was one of the first international markets.

What about sugar

copper

Slaves

copper was traded all throughout eurasia in the bronze age

Crusades

flint was traded around before then

tbh we should either go all or nothing in the middle east

ok, in the current, post-colonial economies.

i'd prefer nothing

Copper and tin were pretty major in the bronze era because they are rarely co-located.

but if you don't fully invest in essentially colonizing a place you're spending more in the long term

No colonizing has a lot of maintenance costs.

Ask Britain and France.

right but at this point it'd be nation building

And it cost both dearly in military upkeep.

islam is too cancerous to do anything about

i don't think there will ever be peace in the ME

better to contain it

Why do you suppose FDR's main foreign policy was to dismantle Britain's colonial structure?