Price of oil linked to pace of freedom

Very often in petrolist states, not only do all politics revolve around who controls the oil tap, but the public develops a distorted notion of what development is all about. If they are poor and the leaders are rich, it is not because their country has failed to promote education, innovation, rule of law and entrepreneurship. It is because someone is getting the oil money and they are not. People start to think that, to get rich, all they have to do is stop those who are stealing the country's oil.

With all due respect to Ronald Reagan, I do not believe he brought down the Soviet Union. There were obviously many factors, but the collapse in global oil prices around the late 1980s and early 1990s surely played a key role. And lower oil prices also surely helped tilt the post-Communist Boris Yeltsin government toward more openness to the outside world and more sensitivity to the legal structures demanded by global investors.

Think about the difference between Russian President Vladimir Putin when oil was in the $20-$40 range and now, when it is $40-$60. President Bush said after their first meeting in 2001 that he had looked into Putin's "soul" and saw in there a man he could trust.

If Bush looked into Putin's soul today, it would look very black down there, black as oil. He would see that Putin has used his oil windfall to swallow (nationalize) the huge Russian oil company, Gazprom, various newspapers and television stations, and all sorts of other Russian businesses and once independent institutions.

Although we cannot affect the supply of oil in any country, we can affect the global price of oil by altering the amounts and types of energy we consume. When I say "we," I mean the United States in particular, which consumes about 25 percent of the world's energy, and the oil-importing countries in general.

Thinking about how to alter our energy consumption patterns to bring down the price of oil is no longer simply a hobby for high-minded environmentalists. It is now a national security imperative.

Therefore, any American democracy-promotion strategy that does not also include a credible and sustainable strategy for finding alternatives to oil and bringing down the price of crude is utterly meaningless and doomed to fail. Today, no matter where you are on the foreign-policy spectrum, you have to think like a Geo-Green. You cannot be either an effective foreign-policy realist or an effective democracy-promoting idealist without also being an effective energy environmentalist.

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Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times and author of, most recently, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) Foreign Policy 2006