{"id":2106,"date":"2006-01-16T11:30:53","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T11:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2106"},"modified":"2006-01-16T11:30:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-16T11:30:53","slug":"the_origins_of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2106","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Origins of the Great War of 2007&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/opinion.telegraph.co.uk\/opinion\/main.jhtml?xml=\/opinion\/2006\/01\/15\/do1502.xml\">Niall Ferguson<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict &#8211; far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 &#8211; were in place.<\/p>\n<p>The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region&#8217;s relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world&#8217;s oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sort of a bolt of lightning as I&#8217;ve been reading Shirer&#8217;s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  I&#8217;m now entering 1939 in this amazing 1960 work.   The look back with respect to opportunities missed is simply astonishing.   I hope Ferguson is dead wrong, but one can see the seeds of war&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Niall Ferguson: With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict &#8211; far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 &#8211; were in place. The first underlying cause [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,39,29,33,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}