“I’m gonna test them,” Republican John McCain said at a campaign rally in New Mexico this morning. “They’re not gonna test me.” ~The Swamp

If you take McCain at his word, this means that he is going to cause an international crisis in the first six months of his administration, which is exactly what everyone who opposes McCain fears and it is one reason why Obama is going to win in a week and a half.  No matter who is elected, there may be a crisis, and either one of them might perform terribly, but McCain distinguishes himself as the candidate who will almost certainly get us into a new crisis and who reassures fewer and fewer people that he can lead in a crisis. 

The notable thing about all of this talk of testing and being tested is that we are apparently on the verge of a global recession, or something close to it, oil prices are slumping and the usual suspects on Rick Santorum’s Enemies List (i.e., Venezuela, Iran, Russia) are suffering the consequences of significant declines in oil revenues.  Nothing has shown more clearly just how ephemeral the purported threats from so many of these petro-states have always been: the petro-states’ strength has risen and fallen in direct proportion to the strength of the global economy, and as the latter weakens they are harmed in some ways even more than anyone else because their wealth is largely based on exporting petroleum.  This serves as yet another reason why rhetoric about dependence on “foreign oil” is so misleading–the exporter nations often have much more to lose than the consumer nations because they usually do not have sufficiently diversified, productive economies apart from their oil and gas industries.  The dependence is mutual, and the exporters have the most leverage, such as it is, during economic booms when our economy and the economies of the industrialized world are faring much better. 

Venezuela and Iran were never great threats when oil was over $120 a barrel, and now that is close to half that they are even less threatening.  Their growing internal economic woes, which are going to become even more acute as the global economy slows down, are going to expose their regimes to increasing pressure from their populations, who are going to be even less interested in any foreign adventurism and posturing of their leaders, which makes it much less likely that these regimes are going to “test” anyone.  That would not stop a McCain administration from demagoguing and exaggerating the threat from any one of these regimes out of ideological fervor, and indeed McCain himself is all but promising that he will precipitate an international incident if he is elected.  Once again the McCain campaign does not understand that talk of international conflict and crisis does not work to its advantage, but simply reminds a majority of all the things they dislike about McCain and the modern GOP.