A foul conspiracy
Re: "War threatens fresh food-price shock", (Business, March 22).
To choke off the world's supply of energy is to trigger a catastrophic chain reaction--possibly starving a vast swathe of the global population and destroying entire economies.
Watching Washington today, it might seem as though the United States has gone mad under Donald Trump, who casually orders the world's largest military to set the globe on fire and torch the global economy in the process.
But this surface chaos obscures a chillingly rational, long-term strategy: the deliberate handicapping of rival nations to secure American supremacy.
Having failed to contain China through conventional sanctions, even at the expense of its own consumers, the US establishment is now prepared to weaponise starvation to maintain its dictatorial grip on the global system.
This policy of maintaining strategic advantage by dictating who has access to oil is not new; Washington has applied it since the 1940s. (Recall that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked, in part, by a crippling US energy embargo).
Long before the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines during the Ukraine conflict, the US was already strangling Venezuela's energy sector, culminating in the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, to force the country to conduct its oil business strictly through US Treasury-approved licences.
In Iraq, Washington engineered the financial subjugation of Baghdad by holding its international oil revenues at the New York Federal Reserve, granting the US veto power over Iraq's own wealth.
In Libya, Washington forced oil revenues into foreign escrow accounts. In Syria, the US military illegally occupies the country, controlling 90 percent of its oil.
Even in a post-Assad reality, Washington maintains a strict embargo, blocking Damascus from accessing the resources needed to rebuild -- a plunder Trump bluntly admitted to in 2020: "I took the oil. The only troops I have [in Syria] are taking the oil."
Now, this strategy is again playing out in the Strait of Hormuz. The US is bombing Iran and using Israel as a proxy to target Iranian oil fields and processing facilities, knowing full well that Tehran will retaliate against the energy infrastructure of neighbouring states.
This threatens to destroy the regional oil industry, and with it, the broader Middle East. Thais must understand the escalating war in the Middle East is not an accident sparked by Trump's temperament; it is the brutal implementation of a long-standing imperial policy.
M L Saksiri Kridakorn
