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.
