Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict

Author: Michael T Klare

From the oilfields of Saudi Arabia to the Nile delta, from the shipping lanes of the South China Sea to the pipelines of Central Asia,Resource Wars looks at the growing impact of resource scarcity on the military policies of nations.

International security expert Michael T. Klare argues that in the early decades of the new millennium, wars will be fought not over ideology but over access to dwindling supplies of precious natural commodities. The political divisions of the Cold War, Klare asserts, have given way to a global scramble for oil, natural gas, minerals, and water. And as armies throughout the world define resource security as a primary objective, widespread instability is bound to follow, especially in those areas where competition for essential materials overlaps with long-standing territorial and religious disputes. In this clarifying view, the recent explosive conflict between the United States and Islamic extremism stands revealed as the predictable consequence of consumer nations seeking to protect the vital resources they depend on.

A much-needed assessment of a changed world, Resource Wars is a compelling look at warfare in an era of rampant globalization and intense economic competition.

Review:

Having written and taught on the issue of resources and national security for many years, I approached the task of reviewing Resource Wars. The New Landscape of Global Conflict with substantial interest. I found that Michael Klare has written an uneven but topical text on strategic resources. It is valuable because it draws the attention of the national security community to the strategic importance of resource access in developing foreign policy, both as a requirement for economic growth and a potential source of conflict. It is seriously flawed because of the largely unsubstantiated assertions with which Professor Klare promotes the thesis that resources will be the dominant source of conflict in the 21st century.

Klare uses current resource conflicts to overstate the causal and predictive role of resources to future conflict. Readers familiar with the rigorous manner in which theories predicting state behavior are substantiated by security scholars will find his logic and conclusions debatable and may, as a result, fail to reconsider the role of resources in future conflict. Resources are important to security and have been so since events were first recorded. Nations migrated in search of water, arable land, food, and the resources necessary to sustain national vitality, often displacing or fighting with other peoples. As civilization evolved, resources figured prominently in political-military strategy: Cornwall, for example, was important to Rome as a source of tin; technological evolution created new resources, such as the components of gunpowder and the metal alloys necessary to produce superior weapons. The industrial revolution led to the mechanization of warfare, which substantially increased strategic resourc es. As Hans Morgenthau articulated in his influential work Politics Among Nations, "National power has become more and more dependent upon the control of raw materials in peace and war."

Although not discussed in detail in the book, World War II served as a case study in the importance of resources to national security. Karl Haushofer's concepts of lebensraum and autarky stressed the salience of resource access and self sufficiency to state power. Access to petroleum was a primary interest of Japanese and German strategy. And, of course, the Belgian Congo became essential to the US war strategy when its uranium deposits provided the fuel for the US nuclear program.

The study of resource-related issues during World War II and the Cold War--and the academic debate over their relevance--has been a dominant theme of national security literature for decades and would seem to be important to any book titled Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Conflict. However, very little of the rich history of resource wars surfaces in Dr. Klare's text. In fact, the author ignores the Cold War role that resources played in the competition for economic growth and power when he writes, "With the end of the Cold War, resource issues reassumed their central role in US military planning."

Interestingly, these assertions are not necessary to make the point that resources underpin the vitality of the United States and are essential to meet the demands placed on the political systems of most states. One need not assert that armies around the world are "redefining resource scarcity as their primary mission" to suggest that access to resources may well trigger conflict in regions where existing tensions, intra-state or international, already exist. Similarly, the author omits discussions of the powerful role resources played in influencing the African policies of the superpowers during the Cold War, while quoting the isolated Africa policy statements of the Clinton Administration to suggest that Africa is assuming a new, central position of strategic importance because of resource deposits. Further, ignoring the Breton Woods agreements, the critical role of economics to free world viability, the focus on industrial output as a measure of power in East-West competition, the rise of economics as a do minant variable in security studies in the 1 980s and agreements such as NAFTA, the author writes that economics became central to US national security only with the Clinton Administration. Such astounding assertions raise red flags for readers of security studies who are used to carefully worded, well-substantiated arguments. These assertions detract markedly from an otherwise interesting book.

The first and last chapters of Resource Wars are designed to promote Dr. Klare's central thesis: "Resource wars will become... the most distinctive feature of the global security environment." The last chapter, surprisingly, was excerpted in Foreign Affairs. Of the remaining seven chapters, four discuss oil, two discuss water, and one chapter briefly addresses minerals and timber. There are good summaries of many of the well-known resource issues and hot spots, such as the Persian Gulf and the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates rivers. However, Professor Klare does not convince the reader that resources can predict conflict. The book would have been much more valuable if it included chapters on food and arable land, strategic industrial resources, population, and resource wars literature, and if it discussed at length the roles of technology, economics, and the environment in affecting the quantity of resources. The book is worthy of inclusion in college library collections because of the current dearth of books on re sources and conflict. Unfortunately, it lacks the breadth of subject matter, rigor, and scholarly review of resource and security literature to recommend including it in the collection of a national security scholar or selection as a course text.

Western Diseases

New from Cambridge University Press: Western Diseases: An Evolutionary Perspective by Tessa M. Pollard.

About the book, from the publisher:

As a group, western diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, allergies and mental health problems constitute one of the major problems facing humans at the beginning of the 21st century, particularly as they extend into poorer countries. An evolutionary perspective has much to offer standard biomedical understandings of western diseases. At the heart of this approach is the notion that human evolution occurred in circumstances very different from the modern affluent western environment and that, as a consequence, human biology is not adapted to the contemporary western environment. Written with an anthropological perspective and aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates taking courses in the ecology and evolution of disease, Tessa Pollard applies and extends this evolutionary perspective by analysing trends in rates of western diseases and providing a new synthesis of current understandings of evolutionary processes, and of the biology and epidemiology of disease.

Just How Stupid Are We?

New from Basic Books: Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter by Rick Shenkman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Levees break in New Orleans. Iraq descends into chaos. The housing market teeters on the brink of collapse. Americans of all political stripes are heading into the 2008 election with the sense that something has gone terribly wrong with American politics. But what exactly? Democrats blame Republicans and Republicans blame Democrats. Greedy corporate executives, rogue journalists, faulty voting machines, irresponsible defense contractors-we blame them, too. The only thing everyone seems to agree on, in fact, is that the American people are entirely blameless. In Just How Stupid Are We?, best-selling historian and renowned myth-buster Rick Shenkman takes aim at our great national piety: the wisdom of the American people. The hard truth is that American democracy is more direct than ever-but voters are misusing, abusing, and abdicating their political power. Americans are paying less and less attention to politics at a time when they need to pay much more: Television has dumbed politics down to the basest possible level, while the real workings of politics have become vastly more complicated. Shenkman offers concrete proposals for reforming our institutions-the government, the media, civic organizations, political parties-to make them work better for the American people. But first, Shenkman argues, we must reform ourselves.

Innovation and Inequality

Author: Gilles Saint-Paul.

About the book, from the publisher:

Karl Marx predicted a world in which technical innovation would increasingly devalue and impoverish workers, but other economists thought the opposite, that it would lead to increased wages and living standards--and the economists were right. Yet in the last three decades, the market economy has been jeopardized by a worrying phenomenon: a rise in wage inequality that has left a substantial portion of the workforce worse off despite the continuing productivity growth enjoyed by the economy. Innovation and Inequality examines why.

Studies have firmly established a link between this worrying trend and technical change, in particular the rise of new information technologies. In Innovation and Inequality, Gilles Saint-Paul provides a synthetic theoretical analysis of the most important mechanisms by which technical progress and innovation affect the distribution of income. He discusses the conditions under which skill-biased technical change may reduce the wages of the least skilled, and how improvements in information technology allow "superstars" to increase the scale of their activity at the expense of less talented workers. He shows how the structure of demand changes as the economy becomes wealthier, in ways that may potentially harm the poorest segments of the workforce and economy. An essential text for graduate students and an indispensable resource for researchers, Innovation and Inequality reveals how different categories of workers gain or lose from innovation, and how that gain or loss crucially depends on the nature of the innovation.

Loneliness as a Way of Life

Author: Thomas Dumm

About the book, from the publisher:

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

Author: Andrew J. Bacevich

The Limits of Power identifies a profound triple crisis facing America: the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad; the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only; U.S. involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic. These pressing problems threaten all of us, Republicans and Democrats. If the nation is to solve its predicament, it will need the revival of a distinctly American approach: the neglected tradition of realism.

Andrew J. Bacevich, uniquely respected across the political spectrum, offers a historical perspective on the illusions that have governed American policy since 1945. The realism he proposes includes respect for power and its limits; sensitivity to unintended consequences; aversion to claims of exceptionalism; skepticism of easy solutions, especially those involving force; and a conviction that the books will have to balance. Only a return to such principles, Bacevich argues, can provide common ground for fixing America’s urgent problems before the damage becomes irreparable.