THE INTERSECTION of ongoing structural shifts in international energy markets with strategic trends in global financial markets poses the most profound challenge to American hegemony since the end of the Cold War. In 2006, Pierre Noël and I wrote in these pages about an "axis of oil"-a loose and shifting coalition of energy-exporting and -importing states, anchored by Russia and China, that is emerging as a counterweight to the United States (so far, most notably in Central Asia and, increasingly, in Iran).1 The ability of such a coalition to resist American hegemony is now compounded by the vulnerability of the United States to financial and monetary pressure by its major international creditors-most of which are at least putative members of the axis of oil.
In the past, the United States has exerted financial and monetary pressure on others to leverage their foreign-policy decision-making-on Britain and France during the 1956 Suez crisis, for instance.2 But now-as the dollar declines to historic lows relative to other major currencies, against a backdrop of substantial expansion in the U.S. budget and current-account deficits in this millennium-the tables have turned. Half a century after Suez, there is growing potential for a coalition of major energy exporters-disproportionately concentrated in the Middle East and Russia-and major manufacturers like China to coordinate the application of financial and monetary pressure on the United States for strategic purposes.
The Axis of Oil and "Soft Balancing"
THE SUSTAINED rise in energy prices since 2002 is redistributing wealth-and, prospectively, economic power-across the world. The main beneficiaries of this process are major oil exporters and the major industrial exporters-e.g., China, Japan and Germany, the countries with the three largest current-account surpluses in the world-that serve them. The principal "loser" is the United States.
