I can understand being afraid of the Russians up until about 2025, but now that we've seen how they perform in a large war (alternative, now that we know that the state of the art in war has swing to favor the defending side) I don't get the fear.
The conventional wisdom is that the Cold War ended in 1991. George Friedman prefers to put the end of the Cold War in 2024 or 2025 when it became common knowledge that the Russians just didn't have much military strength.
Before Feb 2022 we didn't have any conclusive way to determine its strength, so a prudent military strategy would have been to assume that the Russian military was strong -- until 2024 or 2025, when a well-run country in Europe would have realized that it is safe to lower its defense spending (except Ukraine of course and to a lesser extent Moldova, Georgia and maybe the Baltic states and Finland).
The US is a huge oil consumer, but these years it basically produces all it needs domestically, so even if the rest of the world (inexplicably) started turning their noses up at dollars, nothing significant would change about the US's oil supply.
Also, I think the situation has changed drastically from the 1970s and that OPEC has very little influence on the price of oil. The West's decision to punish Russia for the invasion had a much bigger influence than OPEC has these years.
Some one is going to respond to me with the assertion that US refineries on the Gulf Coast are specialized for refining heavy crude and cannot handle the very light crude produced domestically (or alternatively cannot efficiently produce diesel fuel and similar from the very light crude). I think the situation is more that the Gulf Coast refineries can make more money refining heavy crude, so a lot of heavy crude from other countries flows to the US Gulf Coast (and once it is refined, those refinery products get consumed mostly in the US because it would be inefficient to ship them overseas). But in exchange a lot of US-produced crude gets shipped overseas to refineries that aren't as capable as US refineries are, but that is OK because very light crude is easy to refine.
The point is that the US produces slightly more crude that it uses, and could become completely self-sufficient in petroleum products after an adjustment period. Yes, the adjustment period might cause temporary shortages and be quite painful to investors long on Gulf Coast oil refineries, but it would probably not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
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