Author: Sonia Lessuck
For months now, the United States has been on accelerate, prepping for one of the most historical elections since John F. Kennedy was the first, and thus far only, Catholic elected into office in 1961. The race between John McCain and Barack Obama has been politically, racially and socially charged. With all the build-up however, now the new President, Barack Obama, faces the task of following up on all the promises they’ve made in the past months.
While candidates base their campaigns on their political parties, the state of the world does not fall neatly into Democrat or Republican. Barack Obama will be faced with the same challenges fueled by national and international issues. There is no denying that party association determines, in a sense, how issues will be dealt with, but what if certain issues don’t allow for much variation?
One such issue that was sparsely touched on in the months leading up to Nov. 4 was Russia’s dominance in the oil market. Currently, all of Europe gets its oil from Russia, which presents a looming economic problem for the U.S.
Because the Caspian Sea, a great source of oil, is landlocked, any extracting of natural resources from it has to travel via pipelines. During the Clinton administration plans were put into place to build a pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia, then to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. This has come to be known as the BTC pipeline. In recent months, Russia’s invasion of Georgia has presented a challenge to this plan.
In an Op-Ed piece featured in The New York Times, Paul Krugman alludes to the seriousness of these new developments in his article “The Great Illusion.” Krugman explains that “by itself, as I said, the war in Georgia isn’t that big a deal economically. But it does mark the end of the Pax Americana – the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force. And that raises some real questions about the future of globalization.”
These will be questions that President elect Obama will have to answer and respond to once in office. The answers to these questions seem to eventually lead to war, a path that many Americans are not comfortable with.
This is not to take away from the historical significance of this election, but rather serves to put the election in perspective. Although a momentous campaign, President elect Obama will be entering office at a time that is momentous and certainly not celebratory for the United States.
The current economic and geopolitical state of the United States and the world right now is one that is seesawing, and Russia is at the center of it. This is a factor that as voters, citizens, and people we cannot be blind too.
Sonia Lessuck is a sophomore Art History/Visual Arts major. She can be reached at slessuck@oxy.edu.
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