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4 Oil, politics and resource
wars By
Lars Schall
leaders understood that the
future of warfare would be decided by oil-powered
weapons. Therefore, it was essential for any major
power to have a secure supply of oil in order to
supply their armed forces. So a lot of the
diplomacy during and after World War I was aimed
at securing a supply of oil for the military. This
is the beginning of oil geopolitics.
After World War II, it became
clear that oil was also essential for the economy
of most countries, and therefore it acquired an
economic as well as a geopolitical dimension. This
is expressed most clearly, I think, in the Carter
Doctrine of 1980, which says that the flow of oil
from the Middle East is a vital national interest
of the United States, not just in military terms,
but also in
economic terms, and to
protect that flow the United States will use any
means necessary, including military force. It was
on that very basis that US president George
Herbert Walker Bush legitimized the US
intervention in the Persian Gulf War of 1990/91.
LS: And you think it
remains a dominant factor in US foreign policy
today?
MK: Absolutely. Not
only for America's own requirements, although that
is very important. The US also seeks to be the
most powerful player in controlling the global
flow of oil because oil is so crucial to the
world's economy; by controlling the flow of oil
the US has control over the world economy in a
sense. As I see it, this is the 21st century
equivalent of nuclear supremacy in the 20th
century.
LS: Yes, and in fact,
in Rising Powers,
Shrinking Planet you are talking about the
equation between oil exporters and oil importers,
and you are talking in that respect explicitly
about a specific kind of New World Order. What do
you mean by that?
MK: I think in a
world where energy is essential for economies and
where energy is never going to be sufficient to
meet growing needs, countries that have a surplus
of energy to export are going to be in a
privileged, powerful position, and countries that
have insufficient energy to meet their needs and
are dependent on energy imports are in a
disadvantaged situation. The world power hierarchy
will be shaped by those with energy-to-export
countries; those countries will be in a more
dominant position. And countries that are
dependent on energy imports are in a more
subordinate position.
LS: Do you think that
oil exporters like Russia are, related to the high
oil price, in a better position than China in the
sense that a high oil price is bad for China, and
the United States is somewhere in between?
MK: Well, both China
and the United States do produce some of their own
energy, they are not wholly dependent on imports,
they are both in an in-between position. But they
do have vulnerabilities because for their liquid
fuel, for their oil, they depend on imports from
places that are at risk. So their economies will
always be hostage to what happens in other places
that they cannot control, and it's that
vulnerability that has shaped the foreign policy
of the US ever since the Carter Doctrine.
China is now becoming like
the United States in a position of vulnerability,
and its foreign policy increasingly is being
governed in the same way by efforts to get better
control over its dependence on foreign suppliers.
So this puts it at a disadvantage.
Russia is the only great
power of the major powers today that has
sufficient domestic energy to supply all of its
needs, and it does give it a swagger in
international relations that it wouldn't otherwise
enjoy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, if you
look at the literature, the assessments made at
that time, people thought that Russia would be a
declining, disappearing power, it would be reduced
to a Third World country; that's how people spoke
about it. That is not true today. And the reason
is not because it has a strong military or a
strong economy, it doesn't, it's because it has
tremendous energy resources that puts it in a
disproportionately powerful position in the world
economy.
LS: Would you say
that at least one of the reasons why the Soviet
Union collapsed was linked to the low oil price
that was coordinated between Washington and
Riyadh?
MK: I think there is
good evidence that that was part of it, yes. But
it was also the fact that the [Ronald] Reagan
administration embarked on a military expansion at
that time which was very expensive, and the US
economy at that time in the Reagan period was
capable of a massive military expenditure, which
had the calculated intent of forcing the Soviets
to keep up. They had then to divert tremendous
amounts of money from domestic spending and their
foreign clients in order to match US military
expenditure, and they couldn't. The system
collapsed under the weight of diminished oil
income and higher military expenditures and
declining capacity to satisfy their own citizens'
expectations.
LS: One result of the
collapse of the Soviet Union was the new republics
in Central Asia. They see for two decades now a
race by different foreign powers to establish
pipelines.
MK: Exactly.
LS: Will this
continue?
MK: Absolutely.
The struggle for Central Asian energy is still
very much an active struggle. What's different
from where it was 10 years ago is that China has
emerged as a major competitor in this game. China
is now investing vast amounts of money to build
pipelines from the edge of the Caspian Sea all the
way across Central Asia to China. These are some
of the most ambitious pipeline projects ever
undertaken anywhere in the world. This was not
anticipated even a few years ago, but China now is
building large pipeline projects.
LS: Why is this the
case?
MK: As I see it, this
is a response to China's vulnerability to
dependance on sea-borne trade in oil. As China
becomes more dependent on oil imports, more and
more of it comes by sea from the Middle East and
Africa via sea lanes that are dominated by the US
Navy, and the Chinese have come to understand that
this is a double strategic vulnerability: on one
hand they are dependent on imported oil which
could be cut-off because of conflict or whatever,
on the other hand they can't even protect their
own sea lanes because the US Navy is so much more
powerful. So China is very keen to expand its
internal lines of communication, the overland
lines of communication with pipelines to Central
Asia and Russia - if they can work out the
arrangement with the Russians for oil and gas
coming from Siberia to minimize their
vulnerability to sea-borne oil and gas imports.
LS: For the time
being it seems that the most dangerous flash point
in the world is the Strait of Hormuz, but in the
long run the really most dangerous flash point is
the South China Sea, correct?
MK: Yes. At this
moment in time the most dangerous place is the
Strait of Hormuz because if the current
negotiations between the West and Iran fail there
is the likelihood that either Iran will close the
Strait of Hormuz as a response to tightened
economic sanctions, which will then lead to US
military action, or the US itself or Israel will
initiate military action to destroy Iranian
nuclear facilities. I see a high likelihood that
military action will occur in the Persian Gulf.
But if that happens that will be a rather limited
conflict in most likely outcome.
The
South China Sea I don't think is going to produce
in the short-term a violent conflict, but it is
indeed more dangerous over the long-term because
it poses the risk of a conflict between the two
greatest powers of the day, China and the United
States, because China claims the South China Sea
as its national territory, and that claim is
contested by other countries - the Philippines,
Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia - and those countries
are allied to the United States; and the United
States has said that it will support its Allies in
a confrontation with China, and therefore emerges
the possibility of naval clashes occurring that
will bring both major powers into conflict.
LS: Which role will
the energy issue have for the presidential
campaign in the US?
MK: I believe that
energy will be a dominant, if not the dominant,
issue in the presidential campaign because the
Republicans with strong support from the oil
industry are making this a central feature of
their campaign to push for the maximal production
of domestic oil and gas resources; pushing energy
independence as a national security objective,
claiming that this will create jobs, creating the
false impression this will lead to cheaper energy
prices, [They are] also using all kinds of
emotional appeals to a vision of a America of the
past when oil was cheap, when suburbia was in
bloom, when America was more powerful, claiming
that the Obama administration is dominated by
environmentalists who want to put their
environmentalist agenda ahead of the well-being of
ordinary Americans who will benefit presumably
from the unlimited exploitation of domestic oil
and gas.
Karin Kneissl: Spikes in
oil prices are driven artificially.
Kneissl works as an independent
energy-analyst, university teacher and writer. She
studied law and Arabic at Vienna University, has
done postgraduate studies in the USA, Israel,
Jordan and Italy and has taught seminars in
Turkmenistan and Lebanon, where she is a
guest-lecturer in Beirut. Her books include The
Energy Poker, which
discusses the repercussions of the current
financial market crisis on the price of oil and
natural gas.
Lars Schall: Ms
Kneissl, how did you become interested at all in
energy issues?
Karin Kneissl: When I quit
from my job at the Austrian Ministry for Foreign
Affairs without regrets some years ago, I started
as a freelancer to concentrate on energy issues,
because in 2000/01 for me it became really the
name of the game. For example, when I suggested to
teach academic courses on energy issues, the only
people who were interested in it were the military
people.
These
people understood ever since the beginning of the
20th century that there is an immediate link
between physical access to oil fields and energy
security. This is illustrated by the fact that oil
alliances are mostly resulting in military
alliances, too. Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi
oil minister, said once back in the 1970s: "Oil
alliances are more solid than Catholic marriages"
- because they are simply meant to remain for a
very long time and nobody can cancel them.
LS: Do you think the
so called "War on Terror" is linked to energy?
KK: Fortunately this
term doesn't exist anymore in official terminology
of US politics. In 2001 it was meant to fail in
many regards for the simple reason that to fight a
non-territorial enemy is doomed to fail. There
certainly is some linkage due to the fact that
several persons inside the Bush administration did
back then their utmost to create some sort of
linkage between 9/11 and the situation in
Afghanistan and the Iraqi regime. But what I would
like to point out is the fact that out of the 19
alleged terrorists of the 9/11 attacks, 15 had a
Saudi passport and not one of them was of Afghani
or Iraqi descent.
LS: And do you think
it is by chance that those, let us say, "phantom
enemies" of the US are based where oil and natural
gas are based in large amounts, too?
KK: No. But what I
think is weird in the whole thing is - and I am
personally against every form of attacking any
kind of "phantom target - if you would like to be
really honest about the dilemma
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