During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Bush said, “America is addicted to oil.” Richard Nixon, an outspoken critic of communism, was the first U.S. president to visit China, so perhaps a former Texas oilman is the right person to steer the nation into a 12-step program to kick the habit. But a close look at his road map shows that this won’t be a very ambitious journey.

The centerpiece of the president’s plan is a goal to cut oil imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025. This is like trying to shake a drug addiction by shunning your third-largest dealer. The United States imports more oil from Canada and Mexico than it does from the Middle East. Even by 2025, only a quarter of our imported oil is expected to come from OPEC. The president’s plan may sound bold, but a bipartisan measure in Congress would double the cuts proposed by the president.

Even if we were to adopt the smaller cuts, that’s 3.75 billion barrels we’d have to do without. So we either have to find other sources or conserve. The president prefers the former, touting plans to invest in the research and development of alternative fuels, such as hydrogen fuel cells and biofuels. Those sources are intriguing, but few energy analysts think production levels will be high enough to replace OPEC oil in 20 years.

The president’s other proposals for wind, solar and nuclear energy are puzzling. Those may be worth pursuing on their own merits, but they do little to address oil consumption.

Middle East oil constitutes 11 percent of U.S. consumption. Our dependence is real, but it is manageable. The single biggest move the president could make to wean our nation from oil in this volatile, dangerous region is to call for conservation in the form of a federal fuel tax or significant changes in fuel mileage standards.

In reaction to the 1970s oil crisis, the U.S. government enacted strict mileage standards. By 1985, we slashed imports from 46 percent to 27 percent of total consumption. Since then, we’ve barely raised mileage standards, and SUVs and other large vehicles have exploded in popularity. Today, 65 percent of our fuel is imported.

Instead of encouraging conservation, the feds are impeding states such as Washington that are taking the initiative via clean-car technology, which has the added benefit of improving mileage.

The president’s plan to increase investment in alternative fuels is laudable, but we don’t have to wait for the results of that research to begin reducing our reliance on imported oil. We’ve been down this road before. We know the way.