The oil wars: How America’s energy obsession wrecked the Middle East | Eugene Gholz | Big Think

The oil wars: How America’s energy obsession wrecked the Middle East New videos DAILY: Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the last 25 years, the U.S. has based its foreign policy on a sense of primacy and idealism rather than restraint and realism, says William Ruger, Vice President for Research and Policy, Charles Koch Foundation. Ruger asserts that the U.S. failed to recognize the human and economic cost of international military and political intervention. “We’ve really opened up all kinds of challenges in this attempt to open up an exemplar for the Middle East. We actually have created an exemplar,“ he says, “an exemplar of what can go wrong if you engage in the world without first thinking carefully about what is necessary for American safety, and what the unintended consequences of our behavior could b