Geopolitics and New Orleans
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
>
> By George Friedman
>
> The American political system was founded in
> Philadelphia, but the American
> nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch
> from the Alleghenies to the
> Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that
> funded American
> industrialization: It permitted the formation of a
> class of small landholders who,
> amazingly, could produce more than they could
> consume. They could sell their excess
> crops in the east and in Europe and save that money,
> which eventually became the
> founding capital of American industry.
>
> But it was not the extraordinary land nor the
> farmers and ranchers who alone
> set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography
> -- the extraordinary
> system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and
> allowed them to ship their
> surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers
> flowed into one -- the
> Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the
> ports in and around one city: New
> Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from
> upstream were unloaded and
> their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on
> ocean-going vessels. Until last
> Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of
> the American economy.
>
> For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in
> January 1815 was a key moment
> in American history. Even though the battle occurred
> after the War of 1812 was
> over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect
> they wouldn't have given
> it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana
> Purchase would have been
> valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more
> precisely, the British would
> control the region because, at the end of the day,
> the value of the Purchase
> was the land and the rivers - which all converged on
> the Mississippi and the
> ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle
> was Andrew Jackson, and
> when he became president, his obsession with Texas
> had much to do with keeping
> the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
>
> During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion
> among bored graduate
> students who studied such things was this: If the
> Soviets could destroy one city
> with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The
> usual answers were
> Washington or New York. For me, the answer was
> simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi
> River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of
> the economy would be
> shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the
> factories wouldn't come in, and the
> agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative
> routes really weren't
> available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat
> campaign occurred near the mouth of
> the Mississippi during World War II. Both the
> Germans and Stratfor have stood
> with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
>
> Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as
> surely as a nuclear
> strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was
> not, in many ways,
> distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit
> from North America was closed. The
> petrochemical industry, which has become an added
> value to the region since
> Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the
> Mississippi south of New
> Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city
> and as a port complex had ceased
> to exist, and it was not clear that it could
> recover.
>
> The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which
> run north and south of
> the city, are as important today as at any point
> during the history of the
> republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port
> in the United States by
> tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It
> exports more than 52 million tons a
> year, of which more than half are agricultural
> products -- corn, soybeans and
> so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows
> out of the port. Almost as
> much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through
> the port -- including not
> only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal,
> concrete and so on.
>
> A simple way to think about the New Orleans port
> complex is that it is where
> the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the
> world and the bulk
> commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity
> chain of the global food industry
> starts here, as does that of American industrialism.
> If these facilities are
> gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very
> physical structure of the
> global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider
> the impact to the U.S. auto
> industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the
> effect on global food
> supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the
> markets.
>
> The problem is that there are no good shipping
> alternatives. River transport
> is cheap, and most of the commodities we are
> discussing have low
> value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system
> was built on the assumption that these
> commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by
> barge, where they would be
> loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port
> capacity elsewhere in the United
> States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to
> handle the long-distance
> hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for
> the moment that the
> economics could be managed, which they can't be.
>
> The focus in the media has been on the oil industry
> in Louisiana and
> Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in
> a certain sense, it is dwarfed by
> the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source
> of about 15 percent of
> U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf.
> The local refineries are
> critical to American infrastructure. Were all of
> these facilities to be lost, the
> effect on the price of oil worldwide would be
> extraordinarily painful. If the
> river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are
> no longer functioning,
> however, the impact to the wider economy would be
> significantly more severe. In a
> sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the
> physical transport of these
> other commodities.
>
> There is clearly good news as information comes in.
> By all accounts, the
> Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services
> supertankers in the Gulf, is intact.
> Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction
> operations in the Gulf, has
> sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of
> the oil platforms is unclear
> and it is not known what the underwater systems look
> like, but on the surface,
> the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
>
> The news on the river is also far better than would
> have been expected on
> Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No
> major levees containing the
> river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not
> silted up to such an extent
> that massive dredging would be required to render it
> navigable. Even the port
> facilities, although apparently damaged in many
> places and destroyed in few,
> are still there. The river, as transport corridor,
> has not been lost.
>
> What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and
> many of the residential
> suburban areas around it. The population has fled,
> leaving behind a relatively
> small number of people in desperate straits. Some
> are dead, others are dying,
> and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the
> resources required to ameliorate
> their condition. But it is not the population that
> is trapped in New Orleans
> that is of geopolitical significance: It is the
> population that has left and has
> nowhere to return to.
>
> The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a
> skilled workforce in order to
> operate. That workforce requires homes. They require
> stores to buy food and
> other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for
> their children. In other
> words, in order to operate the facilities critical
> to the United States, you need
> a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone.
> Unlike in other disasters,
> that workforce cannot return to the region because
> they have no place to
> live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area
> surrounding New Orleans is
> either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be
> inhabitable for a long time.
>
> It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a
> short time. But the fact
> is that those who have left the area have gone to
> live with relatives and
> friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had
> networks of relationships
> and resources to manage their exile. But those
> resources are not infinite -- and
> as it becomes apparent that these people will not be
> returning to New Orleans
> any time soon, they will be enrolling their children
> in new schools, finding
> new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have
> any insurance money coming,
> they will collect it. If they have none, then --
> whatever emotional
> connections they may have to their home -- their
> economic connection to it has been
> severed. In a very short time, these people will be
> making decisions that will
> start to reshape population and workforce patterns
> in the region.
>
> A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that
> requires physical
> infrastructure to support the people who live in it
> and people to operate that
> physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power
> plants or sewage treatment
> facilities, although they are critical. Someone has
> to be able to sell a bottle of
> milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to
> repair a car or do surgery. And
> the people who do those things, along with the
> infrastructure that supports
> them, are gone -- and they are not coming back
> anytime soon.
>
> It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as
> if a nuclear weapon went
> off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled
> rather than died, but they are
> gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but
> most are. It appears to us
> that New Orleans and its environs have passed the
> point of recoverability. The
> area can recover, to be sure, but only with the
> commitment of massive
> resources from outside -- and those resources would
> always be at risk to another
> Katrina.
>
> The displacement of population is the crisis that
> New Orleans faces. It is
> also a national crisis, because the largest port in
> the United States cannot
> function without a city around it. The physical and
> business processes of a port
> cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is
> what New Orleans is. It
> is not about the facilities, and it is not about the
> oil. It is about the loss
> of a city's population and the paralysis of the
> largest port in the United
> States.
>
> Let's go back to the beginning. The United States
> historically has depended
> on the Mississippi and its tributaries for
> transport. Barges navigate the
> river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must
> offload to the ships and vice versa.
> There must be a facility to empower this exchange.
> It is also the facility
> where goods are stored in transit. Without this
> port, the river can't be used.
> Protecting that port has been, from the time of the
> Louisiana Purchase, a
> fundamental national security issue for the United
> States.
>
> Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying
> the facilities, but by
> rendering the area uninhabited and potentially
> uninhabitable. That means that
> even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the
> absence of a port near the mouth
> of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less
> useful than it was. For
> these reasons, the United States has lost not only
> its biggest port complex, but
> also the utility of its river transport system --
> the foundation of the entire
> American transport system. There are some
> substitutes, but none with
> sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
>
> It follows from this that the port will have to be
> revived and, one would
> assume, the city as well. The ports around New
> Orleans are located as far north
> as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going
> vessels. The need for ships
> to be able to pass each other in the waterways,
> which narrow to the north,
> adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge
> in Baton Rouge blocks the
> river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a
> reason: The United States
> needs a city right there.
>
> New Orleans is not optional for the United States'
> commercial infrastructure.
> It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but
> exactly the place where
> a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will
> return there because the
> alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is
> coming, and that means that
> the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq,
> premiums will be paid to
> people prepared to endure the hardships of working
> in New Orleans. But in the end,
> the city will return because it has to.
>
> Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical
> realities and the way they
> interact with political life. Geopolitics created
> New Orleans. Geopolitics
> caused American presidents to obsess over its
> safety. And geopolitics will force
> the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst
> imaginable place.
>
>
> By George Friedman
>
> The American political system was founded in
> Philadelphia, but the American
> nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch
> from the Alleghenies to the
> Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that
> funded American
> industrialization: It permitted the formation of a
> class of small landholders who,
> amazingly, could produce more than they could
> consume. They could sell their excess
> crops in the east and in Europe and save that money,
> which eventually became the
> founding capital of American industry.
>
> But it was not the extraordinary land nor the
> farmers and ranchers who alone
> set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography
> -- the extraordinary
> system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and
> allowed them to ship their
> surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers
> flowed into one -- the
> Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the
> ports in and around one city: New
> Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from
> upstream were unloaded and
> their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on
> ocean-going vessels. Until last
> Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of
> the American economy.
>
> For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in
> January 1815 was a key moment
> in American history. Even though the battle occurred
> after the War of 1812 was
> over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect
> they wouldn't have given
> it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana
> Purchase would have been
> valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more
> precisely, the British would
> control the region because, at the end of the day,
> the value of the Purchase
> was the land and the rivers - which all converged on
> the Mississippi and the
> ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle
> was Andrew Jackson, and
> when he became president, his obsession with Texas
> had much to do with keeping
> the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
>
> During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion
> among bored graduate
> students who studied such things was this: If the
> Soviets could destroy one city
> with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The
> usual answers were
> Washington or New York. For me, the answer was
> simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi
> River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of
> the economy would be
> shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the
> factories wouldn't come in, and the
> agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative
> routes really weren't
> available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat
> campaign occurred near the mouth of
> the Mississippi during World War II. Both the
> Germans and Stratfor have stood
> with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
>
> Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as
> surely as a nuclear
> strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was
> not, in many ways,
> distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit
> from North America was closed. The
> petrochemical industry, which has become an added
> value to the region since
> Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the
> Mississippi south of New
> Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city
> and as a port complex had ceased
> to exist, and it was not clear that it could
> recover.
>
> The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which
> run north and south of
> the city, are as important today as at any point
> during the history of the
> republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port
> in the United States by
> tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It
> exports more than 52 million tons a
> year, of which more than half are agricultural
> products -- corn, soybeans and
> so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows
> out of the port. Almost as
> much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through
> the port -- including not
> only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal,
> concrete and so on.
>
> A simple way to think about the New Orleans port
> complex is that it is where
> the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the
> world and the bulk
> commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity
> chain of the global food industry
> starts here, as does that of American industrialism.
> If these facilities are
> gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very
> physical structure of the
> global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider
> the impact to the U.S. auto
> industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the
> effect on global food
> supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the
> markets.
>
> The problem is that there are no good shipping
> alternatives. River transport
> is cheap, and most of the commodities we are
> discussing have low
> value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system
> was built on the assumption that these
> commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by
> barge, where they would be
> loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port
> capacity elsewhere in the United
> States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to
> handle the long-distance
> hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for
> the moment that the
> economics could be managed, which they can't be.
>
> The focus in the media has been on the oil industry
> in Louisiana and
> Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in
> a certain sense, it is dwarfed by
> the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source
> of about 15 percent of
> U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf.
> The local refineries are
> critical to American infrastructure. Were all of
> these facilities to be lost, the
> effect on the price of oil worldwide would be
> extraordinarily painful. If the
> river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are
> no longer functioning,
> however, the impact to the wider economy would be
> significantly more severe. In a
> sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the
> physical transport of these
> other commodities.
>
> There is clearly good news as information comes in.
> By all accounts, the
> Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services
> supertankers in the Gulf, is intact.
> Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction
> operations in the Gulf, has
> sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of
> the oil platforms is unclear
> and it is not known what the underwater systems look
> like, but on the surface,
> the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
>
> The news on the river is also far better than would
> have been expected on
> Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No
> major levees containing the
> river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not
> silted up to such an extent
> that massive dredging would be required to render it
> navigable. Even the port
> facilities, although apparently damaged in many
> places and destroyed in few,
> are still there. The river, as transport corridor,
> has not been lost.
>
> What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and
> many of the residential
> suburban areas around it. The population has fled,
> leaving behind a relatively
> small number of people in desperate straits. Some
> are dead, others are dying,
> and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the
> resources required to ameliorate
> their condition. But it is not the population that
> is trapped in New Orleans
> that is of geopolitical significance: It is the
> population that has left and has
> nowhere to return to.
>
> The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a
> skilled workforce in order to
> operate. That workforce requires homes. They require
> stores to buy food and
> other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for
> their children. In other
> words, in order to operate the facilities critical
> to the United States, you need
> a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone.
> Unlike in other disasters,
> that workforce cannot return to the region because
> they have no place to
> live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area
> surrounding New Orleans is
> either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be
> inhabitable for a long time.
>
> It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a
> short time. But the fact
> is that those who have left the area have gone to
> live with relatives and
> friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had
> networks of relationships
> and resources to manage their exile. But those
> resources are not infinite -- and
> as it becomes apparent that these people will not be
> returning to New Orleans
> any time soon, they will be enrolling their children
> in new schools, finding
> new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have
> any insurance money coming,
> they will collect it. If they have none, then --
> whatever emotional
> connections they may have to their home -- their
> economic connection to it has been
> severed. In a very short time, these people will be
> making decisions that will
> start to reshape population and workforce patterns
> in the region.
>
> A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that
> requires physical
> infrastructure to support the people who live in it
> and people to operate that
> physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power
> plants or sewage treatment
> facilities, although they are critical. Someone has
> to be able to sell a bottle of
> milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to
> repair a car or do surgery. And
> the people who do those things, along with the
> infrastructure that supports
> them, are gone -- and they are not coming back
> anytime soon.
>
> It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as
> if a nuclear weapon went
> off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled
> rather than died, but they are
> gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but
> most are. It appears to us
> that New Orleans and its environs have passed the
> point of recoverability. The
> area can recover, to be sure, but only with the
> commitment of massive
> resources from outside -- and those resources would
> always be at risk to another
> Katrina.
>
> The displacement of population is the crisis that
> New Orleans faces. It is
> also a national crisis, because the largest port in
> the United States cannot
> function without a city around it. The physical and
> business processes of a port
> cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is
> what New Orleans is. It
> is not about the facilities, and it is not about the
> oil. It is about the loss
> of a city's population and the paralysis of the
> largest port in the United
> States.
>
> Let's go back to the beginning. The United States
> historically has depended
> on the Mississippi and its tributaries for
> transport. Barges navigate the
> river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must
> offload to the ships and vice versa.
> There must be a facility to empower this exchange.
> It is also the facility
> where goods are stored in transit. Without this
> port, the river can't be used.
> Protecting that port has been, from the time of the
> Louisiana Purchase, a
> fundamental national security issue for the United
> States.
>
> Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying
> the facilities, but by
> rendering the area uninhabited and potentially
> uninhabitable. That means that
> even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the
> absence of a port near the mouth
> of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less
> useful than it was. For
> these reasons, the United States has lost not only
> its biggest port complex, but
> also the utility of its river transport system --
> the foundation of the entire
> American transport system. There are some
> substitutes, but none with
> sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
>
> It follows from this that the port will have to be
> revived and, one would
> assume, the city as well. The ports around New
> Orleans are located as far north
> as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going
> vessels. The need for ships
> to be able to pass each other in the waterways,
> which narrow to the north,
> adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge
> in Baton Rouge blocks the
> river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a
> reason: The United States
> needs a city right there.
>
> New Orleans is not optional for the United States'
> commercial infrastructure.
> It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but
> exactly the place where
> a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will
> return there because the
> alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is
> coming, and that means that
> the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq,
> premiums will be paid to
> people prepared to endure the hardships of working
> in New Orleans. But in the end,
> the city will return because it has to.
>
> Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical
> realities and the way they
> interact with political life. Geopolitics created
> New Orleans. Geopolitics
> caused American presidents to obsess over its
> safety. And geopolitics will force
> the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst
> imaginable place.
>