RESOURCE WARS

Over the night of August 7, 2008, the fragile peace that had been maintained since the collapse of the Soviet Union was broken, as shots and artillery fire erupted along the contested border between the Central Asian nation of Georgia and the Russian-backed break-away province South Ossentia. What was most surprising about the conflict was the immediate and overwhelming response by leaders across the Western world. A region that had once been at the heart of the Soviet Union, now seemed to be factoring into the deep strategic thinking of the United States and Europe. The stakes of this conflict obviously had greater implications than regional borders or ethnicity.

THE OIL RUSH IN THE CASPIAN
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from the newly independent republics of Central Asia, Western oil companies were finally given access to this promising region. The Caspian Basin, which includes areas within Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, and Kazakhstan, has long been known to hold great reserves of oil and natural gas. One of the world’s oldest refineries was built in Baku, on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The oilfields of Baku factored heavily into Hitler’s ill-advised invasion of Russia during World War II. But the news flooding out of the Caspian throughout the 1990s was breathtaking—here may be the largest undeveloped hydrocarbon resources left on earth. Initial reports indicate the region could hold up to one-fifth of the world’s proven reserves of petroleum: 280 billion barrels of oil, and as much as 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Whoever controls the production of these reserves could help shape the contours of the energy economy of the twenty-first century.

As the geopolitical significance of this region became increasingly clear, American diplomacy and military strategy naturally followed. Michael Klare elaborates in his book Resource Wars on the seamless efforts to enhance American interests in the region. In July 1997 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott declared in a speech that the resources of the Caspian “matter profoundly to the United States.” One month later, President Clinton hosted the president of Azerbaijan at the White House, and explains that the relations between the two countries “not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, but also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our nation’s security.”

Klare makes the point that American presidents don’t use the term “national security” lightly. Invoking that level of importance implies to our friends and adversaries a willingness to use military force if necessary to promote these interests. Six weeks after Clinton’s remarks, American forces conducted their first ever joint military training operation in the Caspian, entailing the longest airborne operation in history. The sight of American paratroopers landing in the hillsides of the former Soviet republics provided a highly conspicuous demonstration of our new interests in the region.


A NEW DEFINITION OF NATIONAL SECURITY
The evolution of American interests in the Caspian Basin are indicative of a much larger trend in international relations and the ways in which nations now define their “security.” During the Cold War, our national security was broadly framed as an ideological struggle between a repressive communist system and the capitalist democracies of the West. Natural resources certainly played an important strategic role, but competition for energy and other materials was sorted out through competing “spheres of influence.” When those spheres of influence lost their historic currency with the collapse of communism, competition for natural resources took on a much greater urgency. Klare calls this transformation the “economization of national security affairs.” He goes on to explain how “nothing has influenced U.S. military policy more than the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources.”

AN AMERICAN LAKE
The historic meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud provides one of the most colorful and revealing stories of the role of energy and natural resources in national security policy. Less than twenty-four hours after the Conference at Yalta, in which the victors of World War II began the process of dividing up the spoils of war, FDR met the King of Saudi Arabia on a navy frigate moored in the middle of the Suez Canal. There is little historical documentation of what they said during their meetings. But the result has been clear, and confirmed by every American administration since: the energy resources of Arabian Peninsula are critical to the national security of the United States, and our military is prepared to do whatever is necessary to preserve access to those supplies.

At the time of the Roosevelt/Ibn Saud meeting, the United States was not the dominant military power in the Middle East. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the U.S. relied on the British navy to safeguard our interests in the region. It was the strategic analysis of a young Winston Churchill, who, while serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty prior to the outbreak of World War I, changed the geopolitical significance of the region. He promoted the initiative to convert the British navy from coal power, which Britain had in abundance, to oil—a fuel that the United Kingdom had almost none of. This decision would make the world’s most powerful navy newly dependant on the client states of the Middle East. The relationship between Persia and the U.K. became the template for what was to follow.

The first cooperative oil agreement between the West and the Middle East was the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This partnership was the beginning of a growing Western reliance on the energy of the Middle East, not only to fuel economic growth and industrialization, but also as a critical element in the ability to project military power and defend national security. For the majority of the twentieth century it was the British who served as the international policemen of the Middle East. The British navy patrolled the sea lanes and assured the steady and free flow of Middle East energy into the markets of the West.

Despite conventional wisdom, the United States has actually had a very limited dependence on Middle Eastern oil for most of its history. The significance of Roosevelt’s quid pro quo with the Saudi King was to assure the ready supply of Arabian oil as the catalyst for the post-war reconstruction of a devastated Europe and Japan. This relationship was part of a strategy to conserve American oil for domestic consumption. The United States provided four-fifths of the oil used by the allies during the World War II, and that war effort caused a heavy strain on America’s oil production. Following the war, it was widely touted that the allies had “floated to victory on a tide of American oil.” American military planners concluded that the next World War would have to be fought with someone else’s oil. The days of America’s role as the world’s dominant oil producer were over.

Roosevelt’s strategy proved to be wildly effective. The rapid rise in energy consumption in Western Europe and Japan following the war led to one of the great “economic miracles” in human history. Countries that lay in ruins following the war would rise up to become major industrial powers. Economic historian Alfred Chandler observes how “the German and Japanese economic miracles were based on improved institutional arrangements and cheap oil.” The post-war economies of Western Europe witnessed a fifteen-fold increase in their oil consumption; Japan’s consumption increase 137 times, from 32,000 to over 4.4 million barrels a day!

This unprecedented increase in demand for Middle Eastern oil was the beginning of the “oil addiction” of the modern era. The “addiction” and Western dependence on the resources of the region became more troubling when the British announced they were pulling out their forces after 1971. With the departure of the British, a massive power vacuum enveloped the region. Through the prism of the Cold War, leaders in Washington became increasingly focused on maintaining order and stability in the Middle East. The greatest strategic fear was that with the departure of the British, the Soviet Union would make good on its stated objective of dominating the energy resources of the region.

The Nixon administration was placed in a great geopolitical quandary: the world’s most important energy reserves were vulnerable to being usurped by the Soviets, yet the military debacle of Vietnam in the early 1970s severely limited our strategic options. The most viable option on the table became known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” This was a policy of indoctrinating and bolstering regional allies who would look after American interests. The plan was to strengthen local “sheriffs” who would project power in the region, and serve as proxies for the United States. Ironically, in hindsight, the choice for our regional “sheriff” in the Middle East was Iran.

America opened a floodgate of arms shipments and military support to Iran beginning in 1972. Over $12 billion of sophisticated weaponry, from F16 fighter jets to anti-aircraft missiles, were sold to the country throughout the 1970s. The regime of the Shah became the proxy power for the West, until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, he and his fundamentalist followers brought an effective end to the Nixon Doctrine. America needed a revised policy for securing our interests, and the development of this new policy fell to President Jimmy Carter.

In January 1980, in the midst of an on-going hostage crisis that was gripping the nation, President Carter stood before a joint session of congress and declared: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such as assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” And thus, the implicit policy of the United States became explicit: our military would now be the dominant force in the Middle East.

The following decades witnessed a dramatic ramping up of American military power in the region. The Department of Defense created a new command, CentCom, with the stated objective of securing the supply of energy coming out of the Persian Gulf. The Seventh Fleet was deployed to patrol the sea lanes and safeguard the oil tankers departing from the ports of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Marines were sent into Lebanon, and military aid was increased to our allies Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

The most dramatic expression of the Carter Doctrine came in the spring of 1991. The “power” that was threatening American interests turned out to be the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. As Iraqi tanks rolled across the desert and captured the lucrative oil fields of the tiny nation of Kuwait, alarm bells rang out across the industrialized world. With almost no international dissent, American forces were mobilized in one of the greatest projections of military power in the latter half of the twentieth century. Viewed through the prism of energy security, leaders across the globe deemed it unacceptable to have an unstable dictator such as Saddam Hussein controlling production of up to one forth of the world’s oil. There was also the fear that his military adventuring would not stop with Kuwait. If the world did not act, Hussein may well have continued his campaign into the greatest energy prize—the petroleum reserves of Saudi Arabia.

To argue that the first Gulf War was not about oil is untenable. But to claim that the war was about oil, and that it was a rational response to the vital interests of the United States and other energy importing nations around the world is strategically understandable. Energy is central to the economic and national security of every nation on earth. Without access to energy, the wheels and motion of development and everyday life come to a halt. In the calculus of a nation’s interests, energy is worth fighting for. The dilemma facing the planet is that the abundant and cheap energy reserves that fueled the dramatic growth and industrialization of the twentieth century are becoming scarce. As newly developing economies such as China and India enter into the matrix of energy geopolitics the picture becomes even more complicated. The wars over control of Iraq’s oil reserves may be just a prelude for even greater international struggles to come.