No more threats to energy security?

More than 16 years ago I printed a bumper sticker Make America an Arab sheikdom! Join the Sierra Club. Two months later, the 1973 oil embargo hit. Petroleum imports were then a smaller fraction of the total than it is today: more than 40% and rising, with over half of that from OPEC countries.

Serious though this may be, this never was the greatest energy threat to US security. That came from the world's biggest oil producer, the USSR, which imports oil in exchange for weapons, re-exports it together with its own oil and gas for hard currency, and thus finances the supply of more weapons in its far-flung em-pire of repression. How else can a country that is short of toilet paper keep pouring $500 million/year into Nicaragua?

So Communism is collapsing, there is no longer a threat from a country and its empire in disarray, we are told. "History is com-ing to an end," said a Harvard sage in a comment that is bound to make history. These radiant optimists (most often found, I note, among the panic-mongering doomsdayers), give a profound reason when you press them: "Well, it just can't go back to the old ways any more."

Oh no? It can and it did, for decades anyway, in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Tienamin Square is already forgot-ten, or will be in another three weeks. And Tienamin Square, not glasnost, is the true and permanent face of communism.

No, I do not believe that Gorbachev is putting on an act to lull the West to sleep before a surprise attack, or playing nice to get Western credits. (Communist and other repressive countries can always get Western credits, and when they cannot repay they can get more, provided only they are not allies.) In fact, as a former Iron Curtain national I ask myself almost every morning whether I am dreaming when I hear the latest news from Moscow, includ-ing Soviet tolerance of colonial unrest. But two points are being overlooked in this general euphoria.

First, the imperialist stance of the USSR has not changed. The Soviets are still pouring arms and money into Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan (it is the US that has unilaterally stopped arming the rebels), North Korea and all the other out-posts of the Empire. Soviet troops have not withdrawn from a single colony of the inner Empire that was forcefully annexed (Baltic states), invaded (Hungary, Czechoslovakia) or stolen (Bessarabia, Ruthenia). They continue to guard their own borders for fear their citizens might run away.

Second, the forces that lay in wait before they crushed Gorbachev's predecessors in Hungary and Czechoslovakia are lying in wait now: the KGB, the Soviet army, the party aparatchiks, the bureaucracy. In a contemporary Communist Manifesto, you might say they have a world to lose and nothing to gain but their chains. And it is the KGB and army that have the guns.

They are now lying in wait for the economy and the cor-responding dissatisfaction to reach the point when they can step in as the patriots saving the country from disarray and the great Russian nation from the "aliens." (Nationalism never fails: back the biggest tribe and play the others against each other. It must have been old hat when the Romans used it.)

The general population will not be able to put up much more resistance to such a takeover than the one in Tienamin Square. Three to six months later Xerox, Chase Manhattan, Ford, & Co. will be there for support. The Lefties of press and academe whose apologies and denials are now being rudely demolished by Soviet admissions will be back with profound analyses of why this was the only way to go and why it is really a wonderful godsend.

Exactly how and when this may happen, I have no idea. The only thing that Communist traditions allow one to predict with certainty is that Gorbachev will be posthumously rehabilitated.