What happens off the battlefields becomes very important and in my opinion is driving world politics and in turn the lives of millions of people living in those countries. And not surprisingly, Nations have acquired faces and personalities - a friendly one, a meek one, a big brother and a sychophant - so on. (I leave it to your imagination to associate countries to those personalities :) Understanding the economics behind politics, Resources are consumed to produce Goods and Services, which are Consumed by the Market for Money. So logically he who has more resources should be rich, Right? - WRONG.
There is a slightly different road to riches -->
Approach 1: Acquire resources by tact, create goods out of them in your industrialized country and sell them into the same markets that gave you resources and make money - This is what is the famed East India Strategy or Colonial Strategy.
Approach 2: Now that you have money from colonial ages and colonialism is not right, use that money to create weapons, use weapons and acquire resources. Take resources, call it development and send these resources to another nation to create goods, brand it with your name, sell it in markets and make money --> Neo-colonial Strategy applied mostly in African and South American country
Approach 3: Act as if you are the best country in the world, Raise debt in international market, Consume so much that rest of the world becomes your manufacturing shop and you a market, create dependency on your market for survival and use money generated to enjoy and improve this circle --> American Strategy
And so on. So any educated reader can thus make up his own versions of multiple roads to riches. When this consumption levels go beyond control, as a nation you fight for resources with weaker ones. Now the case in point, Oil for American Cars and the wars and politico-economic strategies. Can any country satisfy the American need for Oil? For data, United States consumes 25% of the world oil. China is a distant second with 8% consumption of total world oil. But can someone calculate the per-capital oil consumption? United States ranks 17 and China ranks 138.(Source CIA FactBook 15th March, 2007: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_percap-energy-oil-consumption-per-capita
World knows how the Gulf has been transformed with the advent of the magic fluid called 'Oil'. A wonderful must-read I should quote here is the novel called 'Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif. Read the review to know what it is all about here : http://www.rambles.net/munif_cities85.html) . Now of late, United states has recently made an agreement with Brazil for SugarCane/Corn-based Ethanol production. Read what Fidel Castro has to say on this: http://mathaba.net/news/?x=553874 and this: http://www.pww.org/article/view/10982/ Don’t read it as a communist mouthpiece against US. Read it for the hard numbers quoted. How much more oil, how many more 3rd world lives to drive cars on the massive roads of United States?
I am not a communist, neither am I anti-US. But I vehemently reject the recklessness with which United States consumes resources. And how for the strange connection of economics with politics, US shows agression against 'target' states. Is US working towards removing world problems or are they fuelling more? Unwanted agression to satisfy consumption needs under various names from :democracy" and "threat to the world" - all in the end to satisfy the greed of one nation? May be the war is cheaper than investment in public transport in the US or convincing the American consumers to pool their cars!!!
It feels great to drive a wonderful car but I hope someone tries to know what 'drives' them, FUEL? Really???? Think deeper!