Egypt's Spring Revolution (2011-2013)

[Fuchs]

Is it a fair assessment to say that oil dependency is a negligible factor in US internal and external politics?

U.S politics are - well, how could I phrase that without being too offensive?

The oil imports are still just a tiny share of U.S. imports and typically smaller than the U.S. trade balance deficit, of course.


You may argue that Egyptian politics were not rational and thus the wheat stuff was still important - but the same could be said for the much bigger bills that stood behind the huge rest of the trade balance deficit.


It's fashionable and simple to single out well-known themes and suspect that they played a decisive role in Egypt and/or Tunisia; Malthusian trap, facebook, twitter - convenient and simple explanations.


Convenient and simple explanations are suspicious by definition in a complex world like ours. The typical ones applied to the Egyptian revolution don't pass simple tests and thus I reject them.


@Entropy:

You can search the for the CIA's role in burying the missile and bomber gaps with the Soviets.

Would you please elaborate on this?
Those "missile gaps" were in part hoax (the one around '60), in part nonsense based on lack of logic thinking (the SS-20 scare). There was also no real bomber gap, ever - just a flimsy CONUS/Canada air defence and an almost worthless SM-1 naval air defence system.