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Source: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/richlowry/rl20030701.shtml
Replacing Saudi Arabia
(Townhall.com) - Rich Lowry Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a backward society that finances virulent Islamic extremism, has failed to make itself a reliable ally of the U.S. Just as the U.S. announced its Saudi pullout, negotiations between ExxonMobil and the Saudi government collapsed over a proposed $25 billion natural-gas deal, another sign that the U.S.-Saudi relationship is slowly ending. U.S. policy-makers would be wise to try to make a new Saudi Arabia in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, a resource-rich region that has little of the anti-U.S. baggage of Saudi Arabia, but already sends the U.S. roughly as much oil. The region is anchored by Nigeria, the world's sixth-largest oil exporter and fifth-ranked provider of crude to the U.S. Paul Michael Wihbey, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic Resources Policy, argues that the U.S. should declare the area a vital national interest, as a prelude to creating a subregional military command with its home port in Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny, oil-rich island nation smack in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Wihbey imagines the Saudi-led OPEC gradually being supplanted by a new oil bloc centered on the Atlantic (60% of U.S. oil now comes from countries bordering the Atlantic), with Russia as an important fellow traveler.