NATO is no threat to "Russia's security" — unless that were perverted to mean the security of a Russian dictatorship. When we say "Russia", we must mean the PEOPLE of Russia; and the extension of full-stage, advanced Western civilization into Russia, not just into its neighborhood, would be very much in the interest of Russia.
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My Russia piece warns of the kinds of danger being pointed out in the piece you sent. Unlike the article you sent, however, my piece gives solutions.
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I must correct one assertion made by the British woman who forwarded the article to you: a Brit did not create the "Internet"; he created the World Wide Web, which works OVER the Internet. The Pentagon and American universities, with some help from Al Gore (believe it or not), created the Internet. The WWW, with its HTML way of handling text, created a standard that allowed many different people of varying levels of computer sophistication, to use the Internet, but HTTP, FTP, secure sockets, and all the rest of the aspects of the Internet, the switching mechanisms, routers, and such, were created by others, mainly in the U.S.
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The alarmist remarks in the Stroupe article's first two paragraphs are absurdly overstated:

The vast bulk of the world's oil, gas and strategic minerals resources either is coming under or is already under the control of authoritarian, or less-than-democratic, or leftist, or otherwise radical regimes either with a decidedly anti-Western political stance and ideology or pointedly decreased sensitivities to strategic US interests.

It is difficult to name more than a handful of resource-rich states that are liberal democracies and that are still significantly aligned with the West. Only Canada and Mexico come immediately to mind, and even Canada is increasingly embracing China and the East in the sphere of strategic energy deals and agreements.

Especially overstated is the preposterous suggestion that Canada is about to move from the U.S. sphere of influence to the Chinese sphere!
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The U.S. has never been a dominant portion of Saudi Arabia's market, but only 17% of Saudi exports and less than 14% of its imports.
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I've heard it all before, for over 40 years. "The U.S. is in decline" — for over 40 years! And every year we become more powerful. All this reaction AGAINST U.S. dominance PROVES the dominance.
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What the article fails to appreciate is that these various countries with 'nationalizing' resource-based industries have NO AFFINITY TO EACH OTHER, and "nationalization" is not INTERnationalization. It should surprise no one that national governments are nationalist, and to the extent that the negatives of globalization need a counterbalance, this is all to the good. Nationalism may be a poison in some regards, but poisons in small doses have long been used medicinally.
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Meanwhile, technology advances and changes in the U.S. and other advanced countries, as makes biodiesel (from soybeans, corn, and unexpected sources, like organic garbage), as well as hydrogen and solar power, fuel cells, all kinds of things, newly competitive with petroleum. Moreover, aside from vehicles, which require portable fuel, energy for other sectors, such as the home, business, and train-based transportation (freight) and transit (people) systems, are easily and increasingly shifting to wind, hydro, wave, solar, geothermal, coal, biomass, and other sources found within the national boundaries of Western countries and either very sizable (like coal reserves in many Western countries) or infinitely renewable and thus inexhaustible.
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So, even if there were a vast international conspiracy to afflict the U.S. and West more generally by raising petroleum prices and reducing Western supplies, that would only HELP the shift to other technologies!
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We have the financial and intellectual capital to carry out the research and install the infrastructure for new technologies. Stroupe is, in effect, worrying very publicly and very loud about a worldwide conspiracy to monopolize the production of buggywhips!
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Worse, for the Third World, as they increase consumption of dirty fuels, they simultaneously increase ambient pollution, with all its hazards to health, while the West moves to cleaner energy and thus reduces ambient assaults upon health.
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As for other "resources", there are some things to keep in mind.
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First, tungsten, chromium, diamonds, and other minerals need a market to have any economic value. There are limited uses for most of these specialty minerals, and refusing to sell, from spite, to certain countries would be seen by most nationalists as just plain foolish, because there is no replacement for those customers.
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Second, there's only so much wealth-generation that poor countries can achieve by trading among themselves. They need Western markets, and will continue to need them for the foreseeable future. You cannot impoverish your customers and still sell to them.
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Third, any "barrel" an international cartel might think they have us over, be it an oil barrel or a specialty metal, is almost certainly technologically replaceable when you are dealing with hugely rich societies with extremely advanced science and the technology to put that science into useful products. Remember Japan's assumption that if only it could take over Malaya's rubber plantations, the West would grind to a halt because it would have no tires for vehicles, no fanbelts or gaskets for engines? We developed synthetic rubber. And Western interests created natural-rubber plantations in Brazil. So much for indispensable Malayan rubber. We can make automotive fuels from coal and natural gas, and use less fuel much more efficiently by installing fuel cells widely. Thus on, and on.
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When crude oil is cheap, we use that. When crude oil gets expensive, all its competing fuels and alternative technologies, once too expensive, become practical. And once you achieve economies of scale, new technologies may become less expensive even than petroleum started at before its supplantation by new fuels.
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Fourth, we have started to appreciate, as societies, that it makes better sense to recycle metals and other materials than to throw them away and dig new metals out of the ground, or produce new plastics from petroleum or new glass from sand. Recyling now accounts for a fair amount of consumer content of many products, and can be upped to account for ever more.
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Fifth, the population of the West, except for the United States, has stabilized and is even in decline. If you pass down durable goods, like fine furniture, from generation to generation, recycle things that break down (refrigerators, washing machines), or have been emptied (glass and plastic bottles) or obsoleted (computers), and you are going from a greater population to a smaller population, you don't need to take much of anything new from the ground.
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This Stroupe guy is living in the past, as his concluding paragraph shows:

Contrary to the assumptions of conventional wisdom, the US hasn't any longer the global leverage to shape unfolding developments in its favor. Russia is rapidly acquiring such leverage, and it is expertly plying that leverage against US vulnerabilities in the energy sphere.

The wealth of the future is not oil, not gas, but knowledge. Science and technology, the Information Society, are the future, and, far from having a monopoly on those things, Russia is almost completely out of the loop.
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Nor can any country monopolize the human mind, and for every nationalist or conspirator against others, there is someone who sees other people not as enemies to be humiliated and exploited, but as fellow human beings to share with and profit with.
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Inventors like to see their inventions used. They don't like them to languish in patent offices or be used by only some of the people they might help. Call it ego, call it altruism, inventors want their inventions used by as many people as might benefit from them.
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Don't worry about oil and gas. Don't worry about economic domination over the world by China, India, and Russia. It's all nonsense.
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Tho all those countries want power and influence, they want it for themselves, each, not for a group of which they are only part. China is as much India's or Russia's rival/enemy, for this purpose, as it is ours. And the same goes for India and Russia regarding China and each other.
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Nationalism sets people against others — ALL others; it does not create transnational combinations of any duration.
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Ambitious nations might combine for a short war. They cannot combine in a permanent bloc. Stroupe may be living in the past, but he doesn't even appreciate the geopolitical lessons of the past. The history of the world is replete with shifting coalitions, changing alliances to provide a "balance of power".
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Right now, some countries might see a need to balance the power of the United States. But were U.S. power ever to be OVERbalanced, then they would have to redress the NEW power imbalance by turning their attentions against each other.
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Look at little Britain. Time and again it could have been destroyed by a combination of the other great powers. Instead, it played one off against another, for centuries, and each saw more benefit in being in an alliance with Britain than in an alliance against it. And so it will be with the United States.
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The U.S. market, U.S. technology, U.S. investment will be valuable parts of the progress of each of these players for a very long time to come, as near to "forever" as makes any sense to talk about, not only in regard to internal development but also in regard to their relative position in the grand scheme of things vis-a-vis each other. Do not doubt that India's national and state governments will compete against Chinese and Russian equivalents for U.S. investment and technology transfer. Indeed, one Indian state will compete against others, one Chinese province against others, one Russian region against others for such investment and technology.
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Relax. Balance against rule of the world by heartless corporations is a very good thing. It is not the U.S. that is being counterbalanced here but transnational corporations that have no nationality, no patriotism, no concern for the little guy anywhere. And Americans as individuals have every reason to favor the development of many forces that would rein in this economic terror that is the real danger to our future.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:38 PM