British Petroleum has finally figured out how to get under the skin of the American Commander in Chief. President Obama, clearly irritated by BP’s lackluster cleanup efforts, has suggested that the British oil giant place in escrow funds sufficient to compensate those American citizens affected by the spill. (BP has just agreed to put 20 billion into an escrow account.) As a political decision, this is both a necessary and shrewd move on Obama’s part. But the underlying geopolitical realities that this oil spill has brought to the surface cannot be understood unless one thinks a bit more carefully – and creatively – about what the BP debacle really is, and what President Obama’s initial failure to take charge really means.

On the surface, the oil spill in the Gulf is an ecological disaster. On this understanding of what the spill is, the main problem is that gigantic plumes of oil – a precious natural resource – are quickly and relentlessly destroying the environment. As BP’s rogue oil eagerly escapes its underwater prison, our wetlands and diverse wildlife expire ahead-of-schedule and unnecessarily. The theory, then, is one of environmental catastrophe, and the dramatis personae are as vanilla as the theory: Barack Obama, beleaguered American President keen to end the crisis; Tony Hayward, the incompetent CEO of BP who makes for an easy target for the world’s politicians, pundits and public intellectuals; the American public, at once enraged and confused; and the shareholders of BP, hiding in the shadows, hoping that the cost of this crisis will not fall on their backs.

A better theory – more powerful and descriptively accurate – is available. This is no mere ecological disaster, but is, correctly understood, an attack on our political, economic, and cultural infrastructure caused by no single individual or institution but enabled by many. It is now well known that a number of indicators pointed toward the possibility of a spill of this magnitude. And yet BP and the relevant U.S. regulators did nothing.

In retrospect, Obama’s failure to properly reform the Minerals Management Service (MMS) is clearly a colossal error. The MMS, the institution that has for ages allowed the oil industry to self-regulate without meaningful oversight, specifically gave BP the authority to drill in the Gulf in April 2009 without doing a comprehensive environmental review of the potential dangers. The MMS thought it would be sufficient to encourage BP to “exercise caution while drilling due to the indications of shallow gas.” Translation: We know this project could go terribly wrong, but go ahead anyway; Americans simply must be able to enjoy their treasured Escalades.

Yet be careful how you conceptualize the BP debacle. This is not a case where an administration has simply failed to prevent an unforeseeable ecological disaster. Nor is this a case where one actor – Barack Obama or Tony Hayward or anyone else – should be exclusively identified as the critical point of failure. That said, it is true that the Obama Administration failed to properly protect U.S. interests and the American people. However, if we want to move forward, we must view ecological dangers of this order of magnitude as threats to our political, economic and cultural infrastructure. For what does it matter whether a terrorist organization or a multi-national company visits vast harm upon us? In either case our country could be maimed or crippled. Moreover, if we think of an oil spill merely as a regrettable “environmental” problem, we will be too eager to (1) punish a small subset of the guilty parties and (2) adopt stop-gap regulations that aren’t effective in the long run. This simply won’t do. We must instead come to terms with the strategic, economic and moral importance of moving to cleaner, safer sources of energy.

This way of conceptualizing the BP spill has some surprising implications. Consider just three:

First, if President Obama fails going forward to take real, substantial steps to prevent off-shore drilling disasters like this one in the future, he will in effect be failing to protect the United States from a grave political, economic and cultural threat. It would be quite similar to a sitting President failing to protect our economic and political institutions from terrorist attacks.

Second, the real strategic interests of the United States must be given pride of place when energy policy is created and enforced; we must temper our short-term concerns with finding new sources of oil and instead give primacy to clean energy solutions that work.

Third, we must really commit ourselves to clean energy in a way that makes a range of policy blunders – e.g., not forcing BP to do a comprehensive environmental impact and safety study before drilling in the Gulf – beyond the realm of the possible.

The BP spill is no ordinary ecological disaster. It’s an attack on our real, long-term interests as a liberal democracy that values meaningful self-government, human welfare, and responsible energy consumption. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be able to move in the right direction.

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