The Republican gains in the U.S. Senate have kick-started a virtuous political cycle in Washington – of which the decision to reopen the vexed issue of the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge is but the latest example. The fate of this Alaskan fastness has long been a bone of contention between the environmental movement and its acolytes, on the one hand, and the oil industry and free marketeers, on the other. The latter camp seeks to open up 2,000 of its 19 million acres to drilling; the former yearns to preserve the pristine quality of what it regards as the crown jewel of American public lands.

President Clinton caved in to the energy Luddites in 1995, vetoing the proposal of the newly elected Republican Congress to develop this northerly wilderness. More recently, the fate of ANWR constituted one of the most controversial portions of the Bush administration’s National Energy Plan of 2001, which sought to reduce dependence upon foreign oil. The most ardent filibusterer was none other than Senator Kerry.

ANWR may be public lands, but they are parts of the country that the public hardly ever gets to. The people will put up with higher energy prices if they think that they are going to lose a scene of outstanding natural beauty that forms part of their mental as well as physical landscape that is integral to their sense of identity as Americans. ANWR scarcely fits that bill. While no doubt some porcupine caribou herds and perhaps even a few polar bears will be upset over the changes to their immediate ecosphere, the effects of such development have not proven to be notably deleterious to their quality-of-life issues in the past. Caribou herds have grown nine fold since Prudhoe Bay was opened.

The U.S. Geological Survey reckoned in 1998 that ANWR is one of the largest untapped oil fields in the world. By declaring it off limits, the government is effectively taking between 6 billion and 16 billion barrels of oil off the market. The principal beneficiaries of this self-mutilation are thus not cuddly Arctic mammals, but the less cuddly sheiks of the oil-producing Gulf states. The prohibition on drilling in ANWR helps maintain Saudi Arabia’s power. A glance at Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” written with the cooperation of the White House, illustrates the Kingdom’s capacity for exerting leverage by keeping oil production up and thus the economy buoyant. The gratitude of successive administrations has led them to agree to such ill-starred Saudi-backed adventures as the Taif Accords of 1989, which ratified Syrian tyranny in Lebanon, and the slowdown of de-Baathification in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

If the battle over ANWR is one that the White House is preparing to take on, it is good politics as well as good policy, despite past votes cast by coastal Republicans against its development as a relatively cheap way of proving their environmental credentials. For just as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the late 1970s against the statist restrictions of the Bureau of Land Management soured much of the West on the Democratic Party, so environmental causes celebres such as ANWR tend to remind voters of the cultural fissures that resulted in the red state versus blue state divide.

These columns do not wish to be counted among the anti-environmentalists. But one of the great truths of the last century is that between the capitalist societies and the communist, the capitalists were the clean ones. Neither drilling nor economic growth are inimical to a clean environment. Finally, it is ludicrous for the left to rule out drilling in ANWR at a time when it is also complaining about our trade deficit. The right way to approach the 2,000 acres in the ANWR is carefully but determinedly, so as to maximize our own supplies of oil in a world when war already makes our access to oil too chancy by half.