For all its greatness, long-range thinking is not one of the many attributes one would assign to our nation. Our public companies often run on quarter to quarter corporate plans; our government's focus, frankly, is too often on the next election. In the United States House of Representatives, that's every two years. That means the campaign never stops, which too often means that the long-range policy thinking never starts.

Examples are plentiful: America's health care policy? Not a policy you'd describe as a long-term one, given its minimal focus on disease prevention, no immediate remedy to the mounting burden placed on state governments by long-term care admissions, and no apparent solution for the coming demographic tidal wave in federal Medicare and state Medicaid health costs. America's entitlement programs? The only thing certain about them is that they cannot go on as they are currently. Each Congressional Budget Office study confirms the obvious absurdity of our current course, which cannot be sustained without revolutionary changes. But it's not a comfortable political topic, so the absurdity endures.

National security and foreign policy? There are some brilliant long-range thinkers in the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and America's think tanks. But these people rarely are making policy. Here too America's policy is quite often defined by a reactive, as opposed to a proactive, approach to the many emerging global threats to our nation and its interests. Difficult as it may be to imagine today, the Iraq War will one day end. What next of America's role in this world? Perhaps understandably, Iraq seems to preclude such thinking right now, but it is precisely such thinking that is required by our government, military and policy makers if we are to be properly prepared for the unforeseen threats of our post-Iraq tomorrow.

And then there's America's energy policy, and it's generous to even use the word "policy" to describe it. The transition of our nation from a manufacturing to a service economy may be nearly complete, but it's certainly not reflecting in our continued demand for oil, which is greater than ever.

By necessity (and to its credit), the Bush administration is now looking at, and beginning to pursue, some long-term alternatives to oil dependence, which President Bush properly labeled an "addiction" in his State of the Union address this past January 31. Since then, it's a credit to this administration that the phrase "alternative energy," used historically to describe ethanol and other non-fossil fuel resources, is losing its relevance as these energy sources become less an "alternative" and more a part of our deliberations over America's mainstream energy needs. From all of this, one hopes a long-term energy policy may yet arise.

Yet, despite the obvious long-term need to adopt these "alternative" approaches to our nation's energy needs, it's troubling that Washington feels the necessity to trump market forces by making alternative energy's production a federal mandate. For instance, if ethanol is all that its advocates represent, such a mandate would prove unnecessary because market resources would naturally flow to its development. This is especially true today, in an economy with unprecedented levels of available private and venture capital, whose managers are acutely focused on finding the next big thing.

What's troubling amidst all the hype around ethanol, however, is that these market forces have historically viewed ethanol with some degree of trepidation. That may someday change completely; in fact, it appears to be changing at least partly now. But it would be more appropriate to let those market forces flow to our next energy resources, whatever they may be, as opposed to mandating one of them--ethanol, as Congress is doing. That's more a political victory for one special interest than it is a long-term energy policy; federal corn lobbyists: 1, America's energy interests: 0.

The uncomfortable and too seldom discussed reality is that it is oil and natural gas that still drive this economy, and no alternative energy source has yet emerged to definitively supplant it. That may not forever be a fact, but it is the fact today and it will likely remain a fact for at least several years to come as alternatives are evaluated, funded and pursued.

Meanwhile, oil and gasoline are not, for at least three primary reasons, coming cheap.

First, the cost of oil is influenced by some degree of geopolitical risk still factored into its pricing. This past May, for example, Saudi Arabia arrested 172 suspected al Qaeda and other militants. At first word of this development, oil futures soared, as the market confronted the uncertainty of the incident and its ramifications. However, by the next morning, as it appeared that Saudi forces had in fact foiled a fairly large Saudi-based terrorist cell, futures prices dropped just as quickly as they rose, ultimately falling lower than they were before their original escalation on the theory that Saudi Arabia may finally be getting serious about eradicating the al Qaeda threat on its own territory. Such price volatility proves only that this is a very jittery petroleum market looking over it's shoulder, well aware that dangerous geopolitical threats linger.

Second, the escalated price of oil is equally attributable to classic supply and demand forces, with supply negatively impacted by the fact the U.S., even amidst this era of enhanced geopolitical uncertainty, has failed to drill sufficiently for oil on our own soil, which would reduce our dependence of these foreign uncertainties. An estimated 10 billion barrels remain undrilled on a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), for instance, and off of U.S. coastal waters, European and other nations are right now drilling for oil in areas where our own Congress has prohibited such drilling by American oil companies. And then there is the growing demand for petroleum in the world's fastest growing economies, such as China and India, where consumption is increasing dramatically, but the global supply is not rising to meet it.

Third (and widely unknown to most Americans), Congress continues to mandate the production of roughly 30 different types of gasoline to be used in different parts of the nation, which has further increased the cost of gasoline's production and largely explains the disparities in prices from state to state. Eric Bolling, a strategic advisor to the New York Mercantile Exchange and an insightful market commentator for Fox's recently launched business channel, predicted this past May that gasoline was likely headed to $4 a gallon by mid-summer. Fortunately for Americans, it didn't quite reach that level, but it did rapidly exceed $3 a gallon in most areas of the nation, and the price of oil per barrel concurrently skyrocketed from $65 to nearly $100 last month. That's the quantifiable cost of a war on terrorism that is not yet won and a Congress that still seems clueless to the extent of this nation's mounting energy crisis. Forget a long-term plan; this Congress doesn't have a short-term one.

Our long-term energy policy, when it does emerge, will not likely be rooted in oil, as both President Bush and Congressional Democrats have astutely acknowledged. What hasn't been said, however, is that the short-term bridge between here and that long-term policy is rooted almost entirely in petroleum. Given that, it's a short-term bridge that requires the use of our own oil resources. Such a step would simultaneously ease the supply constrictions that are burdening this nation with unnecessarily escalating oil and gasoline prices while diminishing our dependence on unreliable Persian Gulf, Nigerian, Venezuelan and other global oil resources.

Ditto the case with nuclear power, which, since Three Mile Island, modern technology has made an impressively efficient and environmentally-friendly mechanism for the delivery of energy. Even in the environmentally conscious European Union nations, nuclear power's safety and efficiency was long ago recognized. But in the U.S., it's now been 30 years since bureaucrats at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have authorized the construction of a new nuclear power facility in this nation. The first one since then is now under development in New Mexico, but it's been a long time coming.

A final point: The likelihood of a potential conflict with Iran hopefully diminished this week, presuming the declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report, which reveals that Iran appears to have suspended its covert nuclear program in late 2003, is to be believed. But the potential for conflict of varying sorts with this unpredictable and often unreasonable regime still remains, even if the NIE findings are 100 percent accurate, and it's worth observing that Israel and other sources promptly challenged the NIE conclusions, stating that Iran has been and continues to engage in uranium enrichment and other steps associated with the development of nuclear weapons capabilities.

High school geography taught us that the Straight of Hormuz, which divides Iran and the United Arab Emirates, is roughly 21 miles wide and that twenty percent of the world's oil flows through it. In the not so improbable case that Iran ultimately attempts to close this straight (as it has threatened to do before), either in provocation, in retaliation, or as part of a larger geopolitical conflict, it will be important that our currently untapped U.S.-based oil reserves are available and sufficient to carry this nation through such a crisis. The time to ensure adequate access to these petroleum resources is not once the U.S. begins its response to Iranian aggression. The time for that preparation is now.

With light sweet crude futures now priced in excess of $90 a barrel, an ambitious short and long-term energy policy that enhances U.S. access to petroleum becomes critical for many reasons, one of which is that, at some point, the impact on the U.S. economy of mounting petroleum and gasoline inflation will prove painful and probably extremely so to Americans and this economy. It's true that ethanol and other non-fossil fuels bring pleasant images of a world beyond all of this. But in a challenging Persian Gulf geopolitical conflict, which could yet emerge this year or next, the infancy of ethanol and other alternative energy sources does not yet position them as our salvation.