Americans are living through the 1970s all over again.
Race riots have returned with a vengeance, inner-city crime is once again the norm, runaway inflation has re-emerged as an economic antagonist, and embarrassing foreign policy failures have returned to humiliate a nation that exited another decades-long war as a loser. The same problems are confronted by new faces who govern with the same weaknesses as the liberal politicians from the 1970s. Only this time, the greatest geopolitical threat facing America comes from Red China, the successor to the Soviet Union and the world’s communist power broker armed with nuclear weapons. The looming threat of Beijing invading Taiwan, the world’s largest supplier of computer processors that make life possible in the 21st century, parallels the Soviets’ hovering over Middle Eastern oil supplies throughout the Cold War.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo exposed the Western world’s vulnerability and dependence on foreign energy. If Americans thought last summer’s record energy prices were bad (and they were), back in the day, drivers faced sticker shock at the pump when the cost of oil practically quadrupled overnight while gas stations were forced to ration. Gas lines and panic buying became routine throughout the Western world in the ’70s as resource reliance on unstable faraway regimes left consumers vulnerable to supply shocks. An even greater threat to global gas supplies came not from the Ayatollah, however, but from the Soviet Union.
Document leaks from the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in 1996 revealed the U.S.
