The Kremlin's Biggest Fear Is Not What NATO Or The Pentagon May Think, But It Is What U.S. Shale Frackers Arel Doing To Oil Prices

Roughnecks wrestle pipe on a True Company oil drilling rig outside Watford, North Dakota, October 20, 2012. Thousands of people have flooded into North Dakota to work in state's oil drilling boom. Reuters

Mark P. Mills, Manhattan-Institute/Forbes: Russia's Big Worry Is Not What the Pentagon Thinks but What Shale Frackers Will Do to Oil Prices

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ruffled feathers this week when, in a February 2nd speech at the Economic Club of Washington D.C., he demoted ISIS and terrorism, to the bottom of a list of key threats to America’s national security. At the top of the list of “five evolving challenges”? Russia.

Right now, though, odds are that Vladimir Putin is more worried about what oilmen like Harold Hamm are thinking than what’s on the SecDef’s mind. Hamm, founder and CEO of Continental Resources, is one of the more outspoken amongst the multitude of shale pioneers who are collectively responsible for the global oil glut — and the consequent price collapse.

We can see what specifically must worry Putin in a new must-read interview with Hamm (courtesy of Christopher Helman at Forbes). Hamm, referencing the fact that American shale producers have in the past half-dozen years nearly doubled America’s oil output, says: “We can double it again.” If Hamm is correct, then the shale fields alone—never mind the rest of America’s onshore and offshore production—would be producing more oil than Russia, and the world markets would again be in oversupply.

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WNU Editor: It is not only Russia that is concerned about the shale fracking revolution to the oil industry, but every OPEC and oil producing county that is dependent on oil exports to finance their governments. And the problem for these oil producers who want higher oil prices .... is that there is nothing that they can do to stop the U.S. oil fracking industry unless they crash oil prices permanently.