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É longo, é em inglês, mas vale a pena.
Ciça, muito obrigado.
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- c.a.t.
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----- Original Message -----
From: Cecilia Pinto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Carlos Alberto Teixeira
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2005 11:09 PM
Subject: New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American
nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the
Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American
industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders
who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell
their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which
eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone
set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system
of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their
surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the
Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city:
New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded
and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last
Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in
American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was
over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it
back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been
valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British
would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the
Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi
and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew
Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do
with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate
students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one
city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were
Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the
Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy
would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't
come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes
really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred
near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and
Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike.
Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable
from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The
petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since
Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New
Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had
ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the
city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the
republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by
tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million
tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn,
soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the
port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port
-- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete
and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where
the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk
commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food
industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these
facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical
structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact
to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on
global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is
cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight
ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these
commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be
loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United
States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance
hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the
economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and
Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is
dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15
percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local
refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these
facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be
extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports
are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be
significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in
the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the
Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is
intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the
Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms
is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on
the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on
Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the
river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an
extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the
port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in
few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential
suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively
small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying,
and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate
their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans
that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and
has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to
operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and
other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other
words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you
need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other
disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no
place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New
Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for
a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact
is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and
friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships
and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite --
and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New
Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools,
finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money
coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional
connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has
been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that
will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical
infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that
physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment
facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle
of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery.
And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports
them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off
in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are
gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us
that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The
area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources
from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also
a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot
function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a
port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is.
It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the
loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United
States.
Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on
the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river.
Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa.
There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility
where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used.
Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a
fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by
rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that
even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth
of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For
these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex,
but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the
entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with
sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would
assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north
as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships
to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds
to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river
going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a
city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure.
It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a
city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the
alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that
the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to
people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the
end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they
interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics
caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will
force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
/*
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