It's the Technology (and Immigrants), Stupid

The book tour took me yesterday to Austin, where I was on a panel called “American Empire.” Its driving theme was: Is America Rome, meaning has it peaked out and begun an irreversible descent as the world’s superpower?

Of course the last decade on the Caspian Sea -- and the construction of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline -- shows that the U.S. is still quite capable of projecting triumphant, positively received policy thousands of miles from its shores. And one of the more intriguing points yesterday, raised by my co-panelist Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome, was that America has endured numerous declines, only to right itself. Another co-panelist, Amy Chua, author of Day of Empire, cited a common thread linking history’s successful “hyper-powers,” as she calls super great powers -- an ability to harness the genius of multiple nations through a tolerance of immigration.

These observations made me look anew at the current decline of Big Oil.

A hot topic today is the search for a technological breakthrough that would shatter the centrality of fossil fuels -- mainly oil and natural gas -- to the global economy. Something of the magnitude of the transistor and its impact on the vacuum tube. See Zoom, a new book by my Economist colleague Vijay Vaitheeswaran and Iain Carson, and the recent cover story in U.S. News & World Report by Marianne Lavelle, for instance.

For its very survival, Big Oil of course is a huge player in this furious search for a technological Holy Grail. But, as the authors write in Zoom and U.S. News, Big Oil isn't alone. Silicon Valley and its deep-pocketed venture capitalists and legendary garage-bound inventors are also in the fight.

That's because of the monumental stakes involved. Imagine a fortune encompassing the current wealth of Saudi Arabia, Big Oil and Russia, and you’ve got a notion of the possible figures.

Which brings us back to American Empire. Zoom and U.S. News seem to assume that an American company or inventor will make this breakthrough. If one does, it will be evidence that America retains its ascendance as not just the world’s strongest military power and biggest consumer of imported goods, but its most potent source of evolutionary technology.

And that is the stuff of what superpowers are made.

But what if it's not a U.S. company? What if the inventor is Indian, Chinese or Russian, such as one of the students or scientists whose entry to the U.S. has been blocked or long-delayed? Or possible immigrants from countless other countries, like Pakistan?

Since we are discussing a breakthrough of historical proportions, it could in fact be a decade, two, or more, before it’s made. Meaning that the key mind behind it could be a child at the moment, and have absolutely no genius identifiable to a consul in a distant U.S. Embassy.

If the discovery is made in, say, India or China, it will catapult that nation toward the comparative great power position of Microsoft in the software world.

The impact of America's less-open doors, including on its technological edge, has been discussed at length elsewhere. But technological superiority has been the hallmark of America's big oil companies for decades -- it's how it talked its way into great deals on the Caspian and in Russia, where in large part because of that technology, for instance in deep offshore drilling, Big Oil is experiencing perhaps its last heyday.

America would probably find a way to cope with the challenge posed by such a discovery elsewhere. But it would mark more evidence of the U.S. leaving it to others to bring cutting-edge invention to the world.