The New Geography of Conflict

Michael T. Klare

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2001

Article preview: first 500 of 4,167 words total.

Summary:  As last year's global shortage of petroleum and natural gas showed, the world can no longer keep up with the demands of continued population growth and economic expansion. Indeed, the competition for natural resources is intensifying. And with four-fifths of the world's oil reserves lying in politically unstable areas, with diamond and timber wars already raging in Central Africa, and with many regions suffering persistent drought, resource competition could easily turn into open conflict. Governments now see the acquisition and protection of natural resources as a national security requirement -- and one they are prepared to fight for.

Michael T. Klare is Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.

VITAL INTERESTS

In October 1999, in a rare alteration of U.S. military geography, the Department of Defense reassigned senior command authority over American forces in Central Asia from the Pacific Command to the Central Command. This decision produced no headlines or other signs of interest in the United States but nevertheless represented a significant shift in American strategic thinking. Central Asia had once been viewed as a peripheral concern, a remote edge of the Pacific Command's main areas of responsibility (China, Japan, and the Korean Peninsula). But the region, which stretches from the Ural Mountains to China's western border, has now become a major strategic prize, because of the vast reserves of oil and natural gas thought to lie under and around the Caspian Sea. Since the Central Command already controls the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region, its assumption of control over Central Asia means that this area will now receive close attention from the people whose primary task is to protect the flow of oil to the United States and its allies.

The new prominence of Central Asia and its potential oil riches is but one sign of a larger transformation of U.S. strategic thinking. During the Cold War, the areas of greatest concern to military planners were those of confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet blocs: central and southeastern Europe and the Far East. Since the end of the Cold War, however, these areas have lost much strategic significance for the United States (except, perhaps, for the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), while other regions -- the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, and the South China Sea -- are receiving increased attention from the Pentagon.

Behind this shift in strategic geography is a new emphasis on the protection of supplies of vital resources, especially oil and natural gas. Whereas Cold War-era divisions were created and alliances formed along ideological lines, economic competition now drives international relations -- and competition over access to these vital economic assets has intensified accordingly. Because an interruption in the supply of natural resources would portend severe economic consequences, the major importing countries now consider the protection of this flow a significant national concern. In addition, with global energy consumption rising by an estimated two percent annually, competition for access to large energy reserves will only grow more intense in the years to come.

Accordingly, security officials have begun to pay much greater attention to problems arising from intensified competition over access to critical materials -- especially those such as oil that often lie in contested or politically unstable areas. As the National Security Council observed in the White House's 1999 annual report on U.S. security policy, "the United States will continue to have a vital interest in ensuring access to foreign oil supplies." Therefore, the report concluded, "we must continue to be mindful of the need for regional stability and security in key producing areas to ensure our access to, and the free flow of, these ...

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