Screenshot from Air Force courtesy video.

Dustin Temple earned an Air Force Cross for his heroism while outnumbered and surrounded by Taliban fighters.

As SrA. Dustin H. Temple fired back at insurgents who had surrounded his unit in a remote area of Helmand province, Afghanistan, his team’s interpreter heard some terrifying chatter come in over enemy radio.

The enemy was moving in to take the Americans alive.

So definitive was the Taliban advantage during the Sept. 27-29, 2014, action, insurgents on the rooftops didn’t bother to take cover from the gunships, fighter aircraft, and attack helicopters that fired on them from above.

“They were braver than any insurgents we have ever fought,” SrA. Goodie J. Goodman said in a recent meeting with reporters. Across the battlefield from Temple during the fight, Goodman’s vantage point allowed him to see how grave the American position was.

“I’d never heard that before … about taking hostages,” Goodman’s battlefield companion, TSgt. Matthew J. Greiner, agreed. “I’d never heard talk so alarming.”

It was probably for the best that the detachment of American Army Special Forces and Afghan commandos, whom the three Air Force combat controllers were there to protect, couldn’t fully appreciate the peril of their situation.

The battle had begun more typically. In the early morning darkness on Sept. 28, the Americans and Afghan commandos moved into the small village in Kajaki district of northern Helmand province.

Already the combat controllers had called in several strikes from AH-64 Apache helicopters and A-10 Warthogs to kill six armed insurgents moving on their position. The enemy knew the Americans and Afghan forces were there.

From intelligence, the airmen also knew the village bazaar was a nexus of enemy activity. Weapons, equipment, and drugs all moved through Kajaki to various Taliban safe havens throughout Helmand.

If the Americans and Afghans could clear the bazaar, they would deal a critical blow to insurgent operations in the region.

Eight-to-one

The Special Forces established three defensive positions in the center, east, and west of the bazaar, while small teams, including the airmen, fanned out to search the market.

They came across a stockpile of ammunition and narcotics. They quickly destroyed these in place and made their way back to prepare defensive positions: Goodman and Greiner to the west and Temple to the center.

As daylight spread across the valley, the enemy began to step up its activity against the Americans and Afghan commandos, probing their positions and peppering them with small-arms fire.

The airmen punched holes through the thick mud walls of the buildings they were in to get a better look at the enemy while protecting their bodies from sniper fire.

Air Force maps of the battlefield, denoting coalition forces with little rectangles and insurgents with triangles, later demonstrated the overwhelming supremacy of the Taliban position. Triangles outnumber rectangles almost eight-to-one.

As the airmen pondered their situation, considering what manner of air strike would best counter their enemy’s intentions, they were dealt an even more devastating blow. Sgt. 1st Class Andrew T. Weathers, a Green Beret and Special Forces medic, had taken a sniper round to the head.

For the actions that followed, Temple would receive the Air Force Cross, the highest award the Air Force can give, presented for extraordinary heroism in battle. Only six Air Force Crosses have been awarded since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and it is the top award for gallantry in combat, short of the Medal of Honor.

Goodman and Greiner earned Silver Stars for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States.

“Around 0800, we started getting a lot of traffic over the radios that the insurgents knew where our positions were,” Goodman related, recalling the battle. “They knew we went through the bazaar.”

Once that happened, the insurgents picked up the attack, firing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Americans and Afghans returned fire to suppress the enemy. Goodman took up a position on a rooftop, lobbing round after round of 40 mm grenades.

At a little after 9 a.m., a chilling message came through the radio. Man down. Weathers had been felled by a sniper while firing from a rooftop.

“I immediately ran from my position to receive Weathers from the rooftop,” Temple recalled. The injured man was still breathing but unconscious.

“I helped lower him down to the ground and moved him to a safer location,” Temple said. “While teammates assisted in first aid, I called in a medevac over the satellite radio.”

According to his Air Force Cross citation, when the helicopter arrived 45 minutes later, Temple carried Weathers across more than 300 feet of open terrain under direct enemy fire to an improvised helicopter landing zone.

Despite Temple’s heroic efforts to save him, Weathers died at the US military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany a few days later. He was the only American fatality of the battle.

“I [feel] a great deal of remorse for Sergeant Weathers. He was an awesome man,” Goodman said later.

Around noon, the detachment was beginning to run low on ammunition. It fell to Temple to call in an emergency resupply, which came in by helicopter about an hour later through a cloud of small-arms fire.

Smacked In The Face

But when Temple, Greiner, and a few of the Afghan commandos ran out to receive the shipment, they were met with a surprise.

The ammunition was still packed in a forklift pallet, much too massive for an individual, or even a team of individuals, to lift.

Despite the size of the delivery, Temple and Sgt. Hollis Webb still tried to carry the pallet back to safety, but it immediately toppled to the ground.

With enemy fire landing all around them, they decided to run back to cover, regroup, and make another go for it later.

Temple didn’t understand what the miscommunication had been.

“It was a strange resupply,” he said. “Normally it comes in a bag, and it would be something you could carry, but this was a different type of aircraft bringing it in.”

While their much-needed ammunition lay in plain sight on contested ground, they established a plan to go in with more men, set up a suppressing fire line, and grab as much of it as they could.

On their second attempt, Temple, Greiner, two other Americans, and six Afghans were able to bring almost all of the ammunition back to the compound they were using for cover.

It wasn’t until they were back inside that they realized how risky their maneuver had been.

“The fire was pretty effective,” Temple admitted. “One of our friendlies said, ‘Hey, are you guys OK? You’re taking fire all around your feet!’ But no one received any injuries.”

The relief of being resupplied didn’t last long. Radio traffic indicated that insurgents were going to make another major push on the coalition troops, force a surrender, and try once again to take them alive.

“That’s when I had the aircraft overhead start doing a defensive scan around our forward positions looking for insurgents close to us,” Greiner said.

It turned out the insurgents were barely 100 feet away. For the purposes of an air strike, such a distance is danger-close and tantamount to being in the same location.

Nonetheless, Greiner called in the strike.

“I had a few-second conversation over the radio making sure it wasn’t our guys that were outside of the building, and we confirmed it. Then we went ahead and launched multiple Hellfires off the rail.”

The blasts were so big that coalition forces were “smacked in the face” with dust through fighting holes they had dug in the walls, according to Temple.

“We did everything we could to push them back from us—everything short of putting our birds at risk. We had to avoid making another ‘Black Hawk Down’ scene,” Goodman said, referencing the 2001 film based on real-life events in 1993, when an Army Rangers helicopter was shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia.

It worked. The combat controllers coordinated the air attacks and ammunition drops from their positions on the ground effectively enough to repel the enemy onslaught and win the battle.

“It’s important to me to stay informed, but there’s just so much junk out there — so much celebrity gossip nonsense. I can barely stand to keep the television on.”

It’s usually accompanied by a sigh or an eye roll before the utterer offers a nuanced critique of a recent Instagram post by Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift.

I used to think this was the immutable condition of the media, something akin to the human condition in psychology. Just as the body must decay into nothingness despite the enduring idealism of the mind, so must the consumer of media crave a red carpet photoshoot despite good intentions to learn about tax code reforms in the Washington Post.

But the veneration of hard news and analysis at the expense of milder journalistic fare is not a media universal, as I learned recently on a trip to Pakistan. In fact, it’s very much an American phenomenon.

My j-school cohort was meeting with a delegation of seasoned Pakistani journalists at the Karachi Press Club, and I asked the group as a lark what they would change about the culture of Pakistani media if they had the power.

They thought about it for a moment, and then two journalists blurted out almost in unison, “More human interest stories!”

“More human interest stories?” I asked. Having spent the last year being inculcated with the values of free speech, governmental transparency and skepticism towards power, I found it a curious suggestion.

“What you need to understand,” explained Shabbir Sarwar, a business reporter for the Daily Times, a prominent newspaper in Pakistan, “is that we have an abundance of hard news in this country. Every day, there are major, major stories that would take the American media cycle a week or more to process fully.”

“Take this bomb blast yesterday,” continued Shabbir’s colleague and Wall Street Journal reporter Syed Hasan, referencing an attack on a Christian church in the north of Karachi. “If that happened in the U.S., you would have the initial reports for two or three days, then you would have the editorials, then the feature stories, then the talk shows, then the long form documentary pieces, and so on until you finally get it out of your system. Here in Karachi, we’ll probably have another blast or two this week.”

While Hasan’s statement is an exaggeration, his sentiment is spot on. Even a cursory glance at most Pakistani newspapers reveals a much higher concentration of newsworthy events and much less in the way of investigative and enterprise reporting.

For example, in the mere three days that our group was in Karachi, the papers were abuzz with the possibility that the city might shut down if the government went ahead with their execution of a captured assassin loyal to the country’s main opposition party.

What a story!

“What we need,” said Akber Ali, bureau chief of Dawn News, the country’s most widely read newspaper, “is less reporting of facts and events and more time to introduce Pakistanis to each other.”

“The fluff is the good stuff,” Shabbir chimed in. “It’s what binds the community. But, of course, our first responsibility is to tell people what’s going on and to make sense of it for them.”

The idea that gossip is a social adhesive has a long academic history in sociology and social psychology, one that has recently been applied to mass media by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who has studied the media in the same way that anthropologists study information dissemination among tribal groups.

Elite consumers of American media, however, have yet to give this notion any credence. The refrain that shallowness is on the rise and legitimate journalism is on the decline is stuck in our heads like a good pop song, too familiar not to be sung.

While Pakistan would certainly benefit from the relative newslessness of American society, we might also take a cue or two from Pakistan and appreciate the cohesion and intelligibility that is borne of a rich tradition of cultural journalism.

Airmen Temple, Greiner and Goodman receive top awards from the Air Force for 2014 combat in Afghanistan on May 6, 2015 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. (Matthew L. Schehl/MEDILL NSJI)

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — As SrA. Dustin Temple fired back at the insurgents that had surrounded his unit in a remote area of Helmand Province, Afghanistan, some terrifying chatter came in over enemy radio.

Insurgents were moving in to take American Special Forces troops alive.

So definitive was the Taliban advantage during the battle that raged from Sept. 27-29, 2014, that insurgents on the rooftops didn’t bother to take cover from the gunships, jet fighters, and attack helicopters that fired on them from above.

Nonetheless, Temple, along with TSgt. Matthew Greiner and SrA. Goodie Goodman, coordinated air attacks and ammunition drops from their positions on the ground effective enough to repel the enemy onslaught and win the battle.

The three airmen, all combat controllers assigned to the 21st Special Tactics Squadron here, were honored for their valor Wednesday at a ceremony at Pope Army Air Field, Fort Bragg, in front of their families, commanding officers, and hundreds of airmen and soldiers.

Temple was awarded the Air Force Cross, the second highest honor for valor in combat, behind only the Medal of Honor. He is only the seventh recipient of the Air Force’s highest honor since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Greiner and Goodman each were given the Silver Star, which is among the military’s most prestigious awards.

“I just feel honor,” Temple said after the ceremony. “When they said I was getting the Cross, I couldn’t believe it. I was just doing my job.”

The combat controllers saved the lives of the soldiers in the Army Special Forces unit to which they were attached, as well as the 24 Afghan commandos fighting with them, according to their medal citations.

The mission was to infiltrate a well-known enemy staging point and disrupt operations. By the time the battle was over, coalition forces had killed more than 60 insurgents, seized 250 pounds of narcotics, and destroyed major stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.

Vice Adm. Sean Pybus, deputy commander of US Special Operations Command, and Air Force Special Operations Command boss Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold spoke at the ceremony, praising the recipients and thanking their families.

Heithold stirred the crowd by noting the “joy that we all feel from our children’s successes.”

Pybus stressed the “personal relationship” that develops between air controllers, whose primary job is to call in airstrikes, and the troops that rely on them to operate on the ground.

“There are so few of them in number that you become very close to them,” he said.

Army Capt. Evan Lacenski, then commander of ODA 7221 of the 7th Special Forces Group, credited the airmen with the success of their mission over the 48-hour long battle.

“Thirteen members of ODA 7221 owe their lives to you, and will never forget what you did,” Lacenski said during the hour-long awards presentation.

He later drew a laugh from the crowd, telling of the countless emails he wrote to commanding officers extolling the airmen’s conduct.

The battle in Helmand Province, which took place in the Kajaki District, the ?site of a strategically valuable dam, was not without casualties.

Sgt. 1st Class Andrew Weathers died of a gunshot wound to the head from sniper fire.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (File Photo by Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory/MEDILL)

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry placed the issue of U.S. trade agreements firmly in a national security context Thursday, saying two pending trade deals demonstrate how U.S. economic and national security interests are one and the same.

“In our era, the economic and security realms are absolutely integrated,” he told a room full of analysts and policymakers at an Atlantic Council event, making the case for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, two sweeping trade deals being negotiated by the U.S. Trade Representative.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership would set rules for the U.S. and 11 Asian countries, which notably exclude China, by far the biggest economic force in the region.

“The idea is to put pressure on China and write the rules before they have a chance to write them first,” said Garrett Workman, associate director of global business and economics and Atlantic Council.

But many economists and Washington insiders see the move to couch these economic issues in a national security context as a way to make them more palatable to the mounting domestic forces that oppose them.

“They need to make this a national security argument,” said Dan Ikenson, director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, “because the economic argument is falling on deaf ears in the Congress and in the more traditionally resistant arms of the Democratic Party.”

Perhaps the most resistant is organized labor, which has long fought the TPP and similar trade agreements that have come before, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was passed during the Clinton administration to open trade with Mexico and Canada.

“When these kinds of agreements fail to make their case on economic grounds,” said Thea Mei Lee, a deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S., “the leadership tends to invoke these sorts of amorphous national security issues.”

Labor isn’t the only point of friction for the TPP, which is in its final stages of negotiation internationally but still has to make it through Congress once the trading partners have settled on the terms. The American dairy industry, which is being pressured to accept more dairy imports from abroad, is trying to offset this breach into their market share by exporting their own product to other countries.

“If Canada opens its dairy market to some extent and if the U.S. gets a good package from Japan, then the U.S. could lower its barriers to New Zealand,” said Michael Smart, vice president of Rock Creek Global Advisors, a consulting firm that works on trade.

Negotiators have many such wrinkles to iron out in the coming weeks, and the Obama administration will likely have to account for many more when the TPP comes before Congress, which is likely to happen in September or October.

But some participants foresee a longer timeline for the agreement.

Moderating a panel before Kerry delivered his address, Frederick Kempe, the president and chief executive of the Atlantic Council, set the tone for the discussion by telling an anecdote.

“I asked a someone who worked on NAFTA what it takes to get one of these things done,” he said. “The reply was, ‘You have no idea what you’re getting into.’”

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From left, witnesses Seth G. Jones, Jonathan Schanzer and Juan C. Zarate testify before the Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing, part of the House Committee on Financial Services. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

As the number of terrorist groups around the world increases, so do the ways in which they’re raising money to fund their activities, experts say.

“The funding is more global and more diversified than ever before, and it’s interacting less with the financial system,” said Juan C. Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who spoke Wednesday at the first meeting of Congress’ Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing.

Funding for groups like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthi in Yemen traditionally has come from wealthy donors and charitable organizations based in the Persian Gulf. U.S. counterterrorism officials within law enforcement and the Treasury Department have long had safeguards in place to identify those paper trails and trace their sources.

But with groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Boko Haram in Nigeria openly controlling large swaths of land, counterterrorism efforts in the U.S. now must account for a host of new revenue streams that are augmenting the more entrenched sources.

These include the oil trade, farming, taxation and antiquities smuggling in addition to the more established illicit trades of drug trafficking, bank robbery, and kidnapping and ransom.

As a result, counterterrorism experts are looking to the military for strategic and operational assistance in choking off terrorist funding.

“The military and counterterrorism are closer than ever before,” Zarate told the panel of about 20 members of the House Financial Services Committee. “These groups have grown more local in their ability to raise funds, so we have to dislodge them from territory if we want to starve them of funds.”

Also casting doubt on some of traditional U.S. allies within the region is the involvement of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in the oil trade, which accounts for around 30 percent of the militant group’s estimated $2 billion net worth.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said there are “trust issues” with Turkey in particular, which is thought to be one of the main consumers of the Islamic State’s stolen oil.

Speaking of a recent trip to the region, Lynch said, “When we confronted senior members of the Turkish government with aerial and satellite imagery of trucks crossing the border and selling oil in Turkey, there was serious denial.”

While oil and other territory-based revenue streams pose serious tactical questions for both lawmakers and the military, the task force acknowledged that they actually may be an indication of progress in the fight against terrorism.

“To an extent, we’re a victim of our own success,” Jonathan Schanzer, vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the task force. “We’ve been so effective at driving these groups out of the financial sector that they’re working more local and more underground.”

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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi speaks Thursday morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

WASHINGTON — Despite a recent series of military losses, the self-proclaimed Islamic State is still more than capable of concerning Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi.

“They are frightening their enemies,” he said this morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “and they’re very good at using the media to achieve this end.”

Al-Abadi is making his first official visit to Washington this week, meeting with President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders to drum up support for his campaign against the insurgent group, which still controls significant portions of the country including major cities Mosul and Anbar, as well as to seek foreign investment in Iraq’s flagging economy.

To combat “the psychological force” of ISIS, Al-Abadi stressed the need for his own government to “remain visible.”

“People want to see the restitution of their government,” he said. “The state must actually be there.”

Last month Iraqi forces were able to recapture the city of Tikrit from ISIS, which had initially taken the city in June of 2014 as part of a major offensive in the north of the country.

Increasing the presence of government in both the minds and day-to-day lives of Iraqis is one of the new administration’s primary objectives. Iraq’s last president, Nouri Al-Maliki, who left office only after threatening what looked like a coup, garnered a reputation for exploiting sectarian rifts within the country and diminishing public services.

Creating a unified perception of government will require international cooperation, Al-Abadi said. This week he meets with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to secure development loans that will fund a host of different economic and security initiatives, including investment in petrochemicals, agriculture and police.

This evening the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will host the prime minister at a reception as he attempts to woo the American business community.

He also addressed questions surrounding his critical comments about Saudi Arabia’s air campaign against Houthi insurgents in Yemen, which prompted a harsh rejoinder from a top Saudi official and astonishment in the press.

“We are very sensitive to wars,” Al-Abadi said in a tone that was markedly more conciliatory. “The end to this war must be soon.”

An Afghan soldier, second from left, and U.S. Marines respond to an explosion inside a mock Afghan village during a training exercise on Sept. 23, 2008, at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif. The U.S. Marine Corps recently licensed another 300 square miles at Twentynine Palms from the Bureau of Land Management.

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — The Twentynine Palms Air Ground Combat Center is a 1,100-square-mile training facility for U.S. Marines where infantry units hurl grenades, aircraft drop bombs and artillery batteries pummel the earth with 100-pound shells.

But buried beneath the ground in this large swath of California’s Mojave Desert are brittle pieces of stone technology dating back 12,000 years.

So before Marines can start training, Defense Department archaeologists have to ensure that the cache of prehistoric Native American artifacts scattered about are surveyed, catalogued and collected. The Marines recently licensed another 300 square miles from the Bureau of Land Management, and the archeologists already are on the ground there.

“We have more than 2,000 sites on the base,” said John Hale, one of the three full-time archaeologists who work at Twentynine Palms, “and we’ve only surveyed about 50 percent of it.”

Hale’s team has completed the initial phase of archaeological assessment for the new acquisition, which involves systematically walking around the land and noting areas of interest and possible past habitation. But the real work begins once sites have been singled out for excavation.

John Hale is one of three full-time archaeologists who work at Twentynine Palms. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

“We’re looking for areas that have a potential subsurface component,” said Leslie Glover, another of the base’s archaeologists. “When you start to see relationships between objects over horizontal distances, that’s when things really get interesting.” For example, if scientists find stone shavings in one spot and burnt seeds nearby, they begin to see the patterns of a rudimentary economy.

But discerning these kinds of ancient geographical relationships takes time, and work can continue on a dig site for months and sometimes years. Given that the Marine Corps has been fighting for usage rights to the BLM-managed land for almost a decade, this is time the military says it does not have.

“We need the land for brigade-level training, which is essential,” said Capt. Justin Smith, a public affairs officer at Twentynine Palms. “This is the first time the base is going to be able to do live fire exercises on such a large scale, with 15,000 Marines and sailors working together.”

The military archeologists’ first responsibility is to accommodate the training needs of the Marines, but it’s only part of the job. “The other 50 percent comes from our own evaluations of what has to get done from a cultural perspective,” Smith said.

After the excavations are completed, the team members begin what they call the mitigation phase of their work, looking at the potential impact of various activities on or near the site, moving targets and cordoning off sensitive locations.

“We put a lot of things in boxes and prep them for display,” said Charlene Keck, collections manager for the department. “That’s often the best thing we can do to preserve the heritage here.”

The preservation sites at Twentynine Palms are numerous enough to fill an on-base museum full of projectile points, milling slabs and rock art panels, some types of which are unique to the region. There are two main display areas, rooms for examination and a storage facility packed to the brim with artifacts.

An on-base museum at Twentynine Palms features projectile sites and milling slabs. (Tobias Burns/MEDILL)

The artifacts are thought to be mostly Serrano, one of the indigenous peoples of California, but other migratory populations are likely represented as well.
At one site on the base, Dead Man Lake, charred bits of ancient mesquite pods have been found, as well as pictographs and rock drawings as old as 10,000 years.
The base also has more-recent archaeological evidence to consider and collect. Much of it relates to early American homesteading and mining operations. There are old American military roads and airstrips, as well.

But the heart of the archaeology office at Twentynine Palms lies in the prehistoric past. “I have a particular fondness for some of the oldest artifacts,” Glover said, referencing some domed scraping tools used by the Serrano. “I have the incredibly scientific view that they’re really, really cool.”

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With the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil falling to its lowest price in more than five years, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries aggressively maintaining its current production levels, American consumers have oil companies over a barrel.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil stands at $61.15 per barrel, a 40 percent drop from the 2014 high of $102.04 set in June.

The price rout has major oil and gas companies scrambling to delay projects and cut expenditures.  This year, Chevron Corporation sold off several subsidiaries and reduced its stake in the North American shale, while Exxon Mobil Corp. cut its capital expenditures budget by 6.4 percent from 2013. ConocoPhillips announced a plan Monday to slash its 2015 capital budget by 20 percent, or $3 billion.

The question is why. Is this new energy landscape the product of temporary forces exclusive to the industry, or is it indicative of deeper economic trends?

“The supply-side narrative is important,” said Barry Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., referring to the decade-long global increase in oil and natural gas production that has turned the U.S. into world’s most prolific producer of energy. “But current prices are as much a reflection of a weakened world economy as they are of having a lot of North American oil on the market.”

“What we’re really seeing here are systemic issues on the demand-side,” he added.

These include a U.S. domestic product that has yet to resume pre-2008 growth levels; a frail European economy distressed by the threat of further debt crises; the prospect of a slowdown in China and diminished Chinese demand for U.S. commodities; and technical recessions in Japan, Russia and Brazil.

“Oil is cheaper than it was, but we’re not exactly in unfamiliar territory,” said Eugene Gholz, associate professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Oil prices hit comparable lows in the mid-1970s, 1980s and 2000s. “The politics here are subordinate to the economics.”

The political dimension to the price drop, however, is bolstered by a clear and compelling rationale: OPEC, led by core members Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, is averse to the U.S.’s successful intrusion into the industry that they have historically dominated. It’s retaliating by refusing to cut its production, which is driving the price of oil down, much to the consternation of American oil companies, and even to the detriment of some of the cartel’s weaker members, like Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia, who need all the oil revenues they can get. The result is a geopolitical staring contest, with both sides hoping the other’s losses will make them balk first.

The problem with this picture, however, which many economists are pointing out, is that OPEC may be just as flummoxed by the current production glut as everyone else.

“They weren’t banking on a million barrels of oil a day coming out of Libya,” said Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow in the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institute. “The problem is that there’s nowhere for this product to move.”

Economists agree that increased demand for energy will require more than the tentative gains evinced over the last few years by the U.S. and European economies.

“Nobody is expecting a full recovery anymore,” said Barry Bosworth. “We need to adjust expectations for the advanced economies.”

European consumption has been held in check by high unemployment and debt crises in Greece and Spain, with the German-led European Central Bank having to impose painful austerity measures on the southern part of the continent.

The domestic Chinese economy, which remains underdeveloped compared with the country’s export base in the U.S., South America and elsewhere, is another trouble spot for analysts and economists, who have long advised China to look inward to achieve sustained growth.

“We’re always looking for it to taper,” said Adolpho Laurenti, chief international economist at Chicago-based Mesirow Financial, of China’s gross domestic product, which has increased at a rate of about 7 percent for the past two years. “The only question is when.”

Still, many energy sector analysts are reluctant to look too far beyond their own industry for explanations about the low cost of oil.

“Since developing fracking and all these new technologies, we knew we were entering a new era,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Group. “It’s changing the globe. But that doesn’t change the fact that OPEC just doesn’t want to give up its market share.”

“They should trust in market forces and allow for a correction, but they’re not interested in that,” he said. “They’re interested in scaring Exxon and Chevron, and it’s working.”

Whether the price drop is related more to a drop in demand or to a jump in supply, economists and policy analysts agree that it will likely have geopolitical consequences. With Libya and Algeria facing stability and security issues and Iran looking for leverage in its nuclear talks with the West, the likelihood of political realignment within OPEC is increasing.

“This situation is bringing Venezuela, in particular, closer to a domestic reckoning,” said the Cato Institute’s Gholz. “Their social experimentations do not come cheap. They would like nothing more than for oil to be $120 a barrel.”

Iran, which Gholz says “typically behaves like a price hawk within OPEC,” is another country that may be looking to make a deal to offset losses from low oil prices. U.N. sanctions against Iran, which are spearheaded by the U.S. and already gouge the country’s oil revenues, would likely be reduced were the country to come to an agreement about its uranium enrichment program.

“The situation illustrates the power of falling demand,” said Brookings Institute’s Ebinger, who also acknowledged the effect that hedge funds, many of which have dumped their positions in crude over the last year, may be playing on the price of oil, as well. “China, India, Brazil, the Eurozone — this is where things should be speeding up. We’re just not seeing what we would like to.”