Energy and dishonor

In return for foregoing nuclear weapons, non-nuclear countries were promised, by Article IV, Sec.2, of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, "the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy." Carter tore it up when he denied nuclear fuel to West Europe and Japan two years ago.

"We are bound by treaty to guarantee the freedom of Taiwan, the Republic of China," said candidate Carter in Kansas City on Oct. 16, 1976. "I would not go back on the commitment that we have had. . ." Two years later he sold out Taiwan without as much as a verbal renunciation of force by his new friends.

The Shah's regime was autocratic; but not as autocratic, and certainly not bent on America's destruction, as the regime to its north. When rioting started, Carter was quick to assure the rioters that the US would not interfere; whereupon he interfered by letting it be known that the Shah ought to leave the country. Iran will now get a regime that is equally autocratic, but anti-American, and possibly pro-Soviet, as well.

Does that leave Israel as the only US ally in the area to be sold out next? No: The region's only democracy, with its back to the wall, has been sold out already. The Israelis have no oil, and therefore no value: After Camp David, Carter took a position more Arab than Sadat; and he announced his full support for the new Iranian government just as soon as it had proclaimed an oil embargo against Israel.

In his masquerade for human rights, Carter had, after the farce of the Shcharansky trial, temporarily held up the sale of oil drilling and other energy equipment to the Soviets the involuntary conservationists who sit on the world's richest oil,coal and natural gas resources, but are unable to get them out of the ground without US help. Carter, who appears to support the stifling of energy sources only when they are outside the USSR (in an unprecedented surrender to the NRDC, he now requires environmental impact statements even for energy facilities exported to other countries), has opened the US to full-scale shopping for all energy producing technology by the Soviets (see Fortune, 1/ 29/79). They may not know how to get their oil out of the ground, but they do know how to get their way with gutless weaklings: stage another Angola, or another Ethiopia, or another expedition by their Cuban Hessians; or wave another worthless SALT agreement before the appeasers' noses.

As explained below, the shortfall of Iranian oil will probably not affect the US immediately. In part, this is due to Saudi Arabia temporarily pumping more oil. "Temporarily" indeed: Saudi Arabia is no more stable than the Shah's regime was; it is more autocratic and more medieval, it is subject to the same disruption by modernizing forces, and in addition, it is subject to the subversion by radical Arab nationalists whom the Saudis cannot buy off by financing their terrorism. The Saudi sheiks may be swept away tomorrow by some Bedouin whose name is now as unknown as was Ghadaffi's or Nasser's not so long ago.

A fighter squadron dispatched to Riyadh does not even have symbolic value, for by now the world knows it has been sent by a President whose word is worthless.

What is needed is not empty bluster and constant appeasement, but the will to let loose America's energy resources: to deregulate oil and gas; to stop hamstringing coal; and to unlock nuclear power's artificial fetters.

That will give not only the American people energy; it will also end the disgrace of selling out their most loyal friends and of groveling before the world's most repugnant tyrants.