Everybody feels the pain of price hikes at the pump. The supply of oil is not endless.

But wasn’t this all predictable, this fact of oil becoming a precious commodity the closer we got to the limits of its availability? After all, it’s a finite resource. As well-known energy expert Dr. John Rutledge says, “God only made a limited amount of dinosaurs, and they’re all dead. … We’re running out of dead dinosaurs—that’s the big problem” (Rutledge Capital,October 5).

Of course, Dr. Rutledge is referring to the fact that fossil fuels, which supply the energy to drive today’s industrialized, high-tech economies, are limited: Only a certain number of the fossils from which oil is extracted are buried beneath the soil, rocks and seas. One day it will all simply run out. Anticipating that day, and doing something about it now, is the challenge presently facing mankind, and mankind has shown little capacity or will to act.

The technology and the know-how to really do something about this have existed for decades. What has been missing is the will to commit the requisite capital and manpower to develop viable alternatives.

For a start, business interests in the oil sector, in particular, have mitigated against it. No oil company wants to sacrifice profits, in a time of heightened demand for its product, on the altar of research and development of products that may put it out of business.

Dr. Rutledge asserts that we need to develop hydrogen, wind, tidal and solar power, and other energy sources. In the meantime, coal is enjoying a revival as a temporary fix. The problem with coal is, it’s dirty stuff. It pollutes the atmosphere when burned and coats anything within reach with its fine, dark dust. Of course, it does stave off the inevitable for a little while. Yet, akin to the dinosaurs, only a limited number of forests were also buried under the huge pressure of the pre-Adamic Flood. Coal will also run out one day.

Thus it is that the search for a renewable resource of energy has become the focus of environmentalists, let alone those realists who have predicted that the day will come when the oil pump runs dry.

The world sees America as the great bogeyman when it comes to energy consumption and resultant pollution. It also recognizes that without a continual supply of this energy-producing commodity, the U.S. would descend rapidly from its position as the world’s leading economic and military power. This all works to create a geopolitical tension in today’s high-priced oil market.

Up to recent times, the U.S. has been able to thumb its nose to the world, thanks to the fact that it had loads of oil stacked beneath its land surface and lying off its shores. Yet reality is slowly dawning in America—even as it reopens wells that, in times of lower prices, became unviable—even as it seeks to squeeze the last drop out of its once-massive energy resources. The U.S. is moving from a century of self-sufficiency in oil to, increasingly, one of dependence on other nations to meet its demand.

The problem is, much of the precious black gold outside America is vested in the hands of nations that show varying degrees of hostility to the land of the free and the home of the brave. This does not bode well for America’s future.

“Oil and energy supplies are real and long-term problems,” Dr. Rutledge comments. “We’ve got to deal [with] them now because without solutions, the energy demand required to fuel economic growth in Asia in the face of limited resources will set the stage for serious conflict between the U.S. and China. The relationship between the U.S. and China in the years ahead will be the most important story of our lifetimes. Facing up to our oil problems today will help us get it right” (ibid.).

We must agree with most of this assessment. It’s a natural extrapolation of the current crisis of supply and demand. Yet we beg to differ on one strategic point. It won’t be China that instigates serious conflict with the U.S. over oil, though indications are that Beijing will have a hand in encouraging such conflict. We would pose an alternative scenario, based on both historical precedent, and unerring biblical prophecy.

The U.S. has passed its peak as the world’s single greatest nation. Few would support this view, though many desire to see it become a reality. The facts are, however, that the U.S. built its economy on self-sufficiency and surplus of goods produced by industries energized by oil. Blessed with great ocean borders to the east and west, and a controllable gateways to its north and south, the U.S. basked in splendid isolation from the time of its founding as a nation until World War i.

Paradoxically, whereas two great world wars sucked the life’s blood largely from Britain, U.S. involvement in these wars only served to stimulate its great industrial capacity to even greater global dominance.

But, since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has changed dramatically. One observer puts it this way: “[A] great empire is rolling over. That empire got its start with steam engines and mechanized looms. It managed to parley its ‘early mover’ advantage from industrialization into an imperial asset. It could produce more weapons and more machines—and the oil to run them—than any of its competitors.

“But the great Anglo-Saxon empire rests on commerce more than outright conquest. Until the mid-1970s, it paid the costs of imperial order with the profits from its factories” (Daily Reckoning, October 10).

While the essence of this argument is correct, the inference that America is an imperial nation is not. The U.S. has seldom overtly sought to extend its national boundaries by conquest. The greatest extension of its territory was purchased in an unbelievable deal that gave it former French-owned territory stretching from the Canadian border to the Mississippi River delta. Called the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of this huge tract of land simply enabled the United States of America to come into being as a nation.

Similarly, the U.S. bought the Panama Canal Zone, purchasing it as sovereign territory in perpetuity. Foolishly, it gave that away some years ago.

Elsewhere, wherever the U.S. has been immersed in 20th- and 21st-century military conflicts, it has gone to war reluctantly, always withdrawing either through stalemate as in Korea, under pressure from public opinion as in Vietnam, or fear of loss of personnel and of being further drawn into insoluble situations as in Lebanon, Rwanda and Somalia.

The U.S. was coerced into an illegal war in the Balkans by Vatican-Germanic EU trickery, then, following an attack on its sovereign territory in 2001, engaged in a legal war for which it has been largely berated ever since. This is not your typical imperialist nation. To accuse America of imperialist motives shows gross ignorance of the facts and a poor grasp of the true nature of international relations.

Yet, there, indeed, once was an Anglo-Saxon empire. It belonged to the British during the 19th and half of the 20th century. It led the U.S. in getting its start “with steam engines and mechanized looms.”

This was when coal was king, and the empire had plenty of it. But the great British Empire had collapsed by the mid-1960s, its industrial fabric largely torn apart, its trade connections with its dominions sundered by a foolish whim to join its future with a federating Europe rather than with the people of its heritage scattered abroad. Cut off from its previously guaranteed global sources of raw materials and cheap labor, its sea gates thrown away, Britain inevitably lost the powerhouse of its empire, its huge industrial capacity and its secure global trade routes.

The result? Britain, in just 50 years, went from being the world’s largest producer of automobiles shortly after the Second World War, to losing its entire motor vehicle industry to foreign ownership or bankruptcy by the end of the century. Its textile industry fled offshore. Its mines and its mills were largely forced into closure, priced out of the market by the rising power of cheap Asian/Indian labor within its former colonial possessions.

Once having enjoyed the most efficient farming industry in the world, EU membership decimated Britain’s farming communities. The great British Empire, which indeed did once “rest on commerce more than outright conquest,” had “rolled over.”

Forty years later, we are witnessing the same process affecting the mighty U.S. Its days as the world’s singular superpower are numbered. The U.S. is rolling over from its height as the world’s largest creditor nation—once outproducing all others with its oil-fueled, self-sufficient economy—to becoming the world’s largest debtor nation by far—a net importer of goods from food to consumables, increasingly even including the high-tech goods whose production it pioneered.

And the very source of energy that largely empowered its once-great industrial and military might—oil—is being depleted rapidly.

Given all the other variables, in the end, it’s all going to be about oil. And herein lies our disagreement with the earlier quote. For, in this respect, it will not be China that poses the greatest strategic threat to the U.S.

The world’s largest exporter is Germany. Unlike the U.S., Germany has linked itself to a ready supply of oil and gas through a mutually dependent relationship with a huge developing supplier—Russia.

Berlin has supplied the capital and technology; Moscow supplies the product. To each, this agreement has tremendous strategic advantages. Neither can afford to upset the other politically, for they stare at each other across the vast Polish plain, having a history of massive disaster should they be drawn into conflict. It suits each to depend on the other; this makes for stability in their international relations.

Such is not the case with America and its alternative sources of supply.

The U.S. has opted for the Middle East as one of its suppliers to fill the gap as America’s own oil reserves dry up. This is hardly friendly territory. Being aware of this, it would be natural for relationships to form among those who wish to work for America’s demise, to restrict—or at a strategically convenient time—even cut off, the U.S. from its sources of energy.

China, the developing Islamic alliance led by Iran, and the European Union through its Franco-German leadership, have all expressed an interest in working to see the U.S. toppled from its perch.

Iran sits atop a major pool of oil in the Middle East and is working to add the huge oil-production capacity of Iraq to that.

The EU (destined to be led by Germany) and Russia have a workable agreement. China controls the sea gates through which much of Middle Eastern oil flows. Any student of international relations would put this equation together and come up with a future alliance of these three powers having a common interest to see the U.S. brought to its knees.

Iran could influence opec to simply turn off the tap of oil supply to the U.S. China could shut the gates, preventing supplies from other sources entering America. A German-led EU, the world’s largest trading bloc—content with its guaranteed source of energy supply and with its eastern borders secured by a convenient alliance with Russia—would be ideally placed, with the U.S. thus blockaded, to simply de-energize the U.S. and cripple its economy.

Sound far-fetched? Not to any geopolitical strategist. Is it likely to occur? Look at the present state of affairs in Germany, then consider its history.

“Few states of Germany’s size and central location would ever be satisfied deferring to Washington’s interests, while most of the rest of the EU’s 25 member states find the idea of German leadership disturbing at best. That leaves a number of other paths that Germany has trod before in the interests of German primacy—under leaders with names like Charlemagne, Bismarck, Wilhelm and Hitler” (Stratfor, October 11). That’s a rational observation from a realist perspective.

Watch Germany, and watch the oil issue! The two, in tandem, are destined to have great impact on the future of the United States of America and, indeed, the whole world economy.

Write for our free booklets Germany and the Holy Roman Empire and The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Study them, then make up your own mind as to whether this scenario will be likely to occur in the near future.