After President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he began a series of trips around the world to apologize for American hegemony.  His topics included apologizing to the Muslim world for the War on Terror, to Europe for American arrogance in foreign and economic policy, to the countries in the Americas for not engaging our neighbors, and for the mistakes of the CIA in interrogation techniques in Guantanamo that led to the “loss of American moral authority” throughout the world.

On October 1, 2012, the American author and political commentator Thomas Sowell wrote an op-ed article that summarized President Obama’s world tour:

What did it accomplish? It brought the United States down a peg, in the eyes of the world, something that he has sought to do in many other ways. These bows (to foreign leaders) were perfectly consistent with his view of a maldistribution of power and prestige internationally, just as his domestic agenda reflects a felt need for a redistribution of wealth and power within American society. Nor is it surprising that he imposes draconian restrictions on industrial activities in the United States, in the name of fighting "global warming," while accepting the fact that Third World nations that are beginning to industrialize will generate far more pollution than any restrictions in America can possibly offset. That is another example of international redistribution — and payback for perceived past oppressions or exploitation of the West against the non-West. So is replacing pro-Western governments in the Middle East with Islamic extremist governments.

Do these words, written over ten years ago, sound prescient today?  I think so.  President Joe Biden has continued to pursue the agenda that President Obama developed during his administration.

On January 20, 2021, President Biden canceled the permit for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would have delivered around 1 million barrels of Canadian crude oil a day to U.S. refiners.  In his executive order, President Biden stated, “Leaving the Keystone XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my Administration’s economic and climate imperatives.”  On January 27, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order announcing a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands and in offshore waters.  On April 16, 2021, at President’s Biden’s direction, secretary of the interior Deb Haaland revoked policies in Secretarial Order 3398 established by the Trump administration, including rejecting “American Energy Independence” as a goal.

In early September 2023, the Biden administration canceled all the seven remaining outstanding oil and gas leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, stating, “As the climate crisis warms the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the world, we have a responsibility to protect this treasured region for all ages.”  In late September 2023, the Biden administration announced that the congressionally mandated five-year plan for offshore oil drilling included just three sales, all in the Gulf of Mexico — the lowest number in any five-year plan since the government began publishing them in 1980.  In addition to establishing regulations to limit oil and gas production in the U.S., President Biden has declared large areas of land in the U.S. “off limits” for fossil fuel production in the energy-rich Permian Basin of the Southwestern U.S. to protect wildlife such as the Greater Prairie Chicken.  During his term in office, President Biden has done far more than any president in U.S. history to eliminate U.S. energy independence.

Why?

The U.S. has become the most powerful nation in the world in part because America possesses a large share of the fossil fuel deposits on Earth.  Not only is a nation’s standard of living directly related to its per capita consumption of energy, but energy is a force multiplier.  The traditional hegemony that the U.S. has enjoyed the world over the last 75 years, or more, is the result of U.S. domestic production of coal, oil, and natural gas to generate electricity and the U.S. electrical power grid that distributes it.  Until recently, when regional demand began to exceed supply, the electric power grid in the U.S. was the most economical and reliable of any nation in the world.  The forced retirement of coal-fired power plants and nuclear power plants (which emit only steam and heat) in the last ten years throughout the U.S. by utilities to placate global warming activists, has rendered the U.S. grid unreliable.  The replacement of these fossil fuel and nuclear plants with unreliable, expensive alternative energy generators such as solar voltaic cells and wind turbines will only exacerbate the issue.  

The manufacturing capability in basic industries in the U.S. — such as aluminum, iron and steelmaking, transportation, construction machinery and agriculture — depends on reliable, cost-effective energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and electric power.  The military-industrial complex in the U.S. has enabled America to manufacture airplanes, warships, tanks, submarines, and missiles that were instrumental in winning World War II, checking communist aggression, and advancing democratic interests throughout the world.  The fossil fuel resources that power this military might enable the U.S. to defend freedom throughout the world — and when necessary, impose our will on our adversaries.

Who or what groups would want to see the elimination of the advantages that the U.S. enjoys from fossil fuels?  How about China?  On December 18, 2023, a news report revealed that “Energy Foundation China,” which has its headquarters in San Francisco, Calif., has significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party and receives most of its funding from the CCP.  Its stated goal in the U.S.?  “Phasing out coal and electrifying the transportation sector.”  It should be noted that China built more coal-fired power plants in 2021 than the rest of the world combined, and China has a near monopoly on the production of lithium-ion battery cells for E.V.s.

How about the United Nations?  The U.N. has long chafed under the burden of the economic and ideological dominance of U.S. foreign policy in the world.  The U.N. would like nothing better than to see America’s influence reduced.

How about the World Economic Forum?  Al Gore, John Kerry, and other globalists hobnob with the heads of global investment firms, international corporations, bankers, climate activists, and world politicians in Davos, along with Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum.  Schwab has called for a global “delocalization” of worldwide industrial production.  He envisions a shift in the “world’s economic center of gravity to Asia,” which will result in a “tripolar world” where Western Europe, North America, and East Asia are in a position of economic parity.  On November 11, 2016, an article titled “America’s Dominance is Over.  By 2030, We’ll Have a Handful of Global Powers” was published on the World Economic Forum website.  The author stated: “There will be no single hegemonic force but instead a handful of countries — the U.S., Russia, China, Germany, India and Japan chief among them — exhibiting semi-imperial tendencies.”  As a result, Schwab states: “The West can no longer hope to dictate the rules of the game.”

Is being the world’s superpower and the economic and military leader of the free world a good thing for America?  I guess it depends on your point of view.  If not, how does one rid the world of U.S. hegemony and reduce it to an economic and military power like Europe?  Destroy the energy sector by eliminating fossil fuel production.  Render the electric power grid unreliable by replacing fossil fuel and nuclear power plants with wind and solar generators.  “Delocalize” the manufacturing sector in the U.S. to eliminate jobs, reduce the GDP and weaken the military-industrial complex.  Eliminate any energy cost advantage that the U.S. economy has against world economic competitors like China, Russia, India, and others.  Rely on sun and wind generation of electricity.  After all, doesn’t the sun shine equally on all the nations of the Earth?

Guy K. Mitchell, Jr. is the author of a Wall Street Journal bestselling book titled Global Warming: The Great Deception — The Triumph of Dollars and Politics Over Science and Why You Should Care.  www.globalwarmingdeception.com

Image: kie-ker via Pixabay.