Customer Reviews

Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

And it's a pity because Klare is on the right track with his analysis. Very early in the book he puts the issue into context. In a time of globalization with more and more countries industrializing, there is a concomitant increased demand for finite resources, which is exacerbated by growing populations.

To the extent that these resources are in unstable regions of the world, and many of them are, it poses a problem. The arguments about a convergence of resources, geography, and national self-interests seems to recall Europe of the last century and their "great game" of Middle Eastern conquests or their "Scramble for Africa." Some of the objectives are the same - oil and gems - but mostly the resources in question are simply essential to basic national existence - food and water. Klare's analysis is penetrating and supported with tables. His data seems to point to an inevitable conflict between Israel, Jordan, and Syria over the River Jordans' outflow. Similar population pressures impact the Nile, and Egypt's relations with its neighbors.

In contrast to the plausible and much more likely scenarios as portrayed here, shallow arguments such as Samuel Huntington's CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS are enjoying post September 11th renewed sales. Huntington has seemingly identified the problem, but many persons recognize his analysis as superficial and too generalized and his clash was never originally about terrorism. More to the point is the type of collapsed-state, money-laundering financed type of conflicts involving diamonds which Klare identifies as taking place in Sierra Leone and Angola. Here we have an intersection of Western corporate interests, strategic resources and local political considerations. These "conflict diamonds" are a topic of broad discussion in Matthew Hart's recent DIAMOND: A JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF AN OBSESSION. Here Klare sees them as illustrative of the type of resource over which future wars will be fought. In Klare's view they are more likely to live up to their other name - "blood diamonds".

RESOURCE WARS is a wide ranging, carefully argued, and very plausible portrait of where future battles will be, and what they will be about.

Out of oil by 2050, or 2040 , or 2080 and shortages long before then. Potable water.. scarce now and getting scarcer (one of the roots of the 67 Arab-Israeli War was water rights). The facts roll over the reader, dispassionate and almost mindnumbing in detail. Population growing far beyond any capacity to maintain (The population of Ethiopia in 1950 was 18 million, the projected population in 2050 will be 212 million!)Civil wars, wars by proxy, the depletion and devastation of irreplacable old growth forests, rainforests, whole fragile ecosystems gone in a decade. And these are facts....facts no reputable scientist will argue other then exactly WHEN the resources will be finally depleted. The feeling I got at the end of the book was that we are all 'fiddling' as our world starts to burn.

This is a very thoughtful and well-documented book that has been 20 years in the making--although it was actually researched and written in the past three years, the author is on record as having discussed water wars in 1980, and should be credited with anticipating the relationship between natural resources, ethnic conflict, and great power discomfort well before the pack.

He covers oil in particular, energy in more general terms (to my disappointment, not breaking natural gas out from oil, a very relevant distinction for commodities brokers), water, minerals, and timber. His footnotes are quite satisfactory and strike a very fine balance--unusually good--between policy, military, and academic or industry sources.

Sadly, I believe that this book, as with Laurie Garrett's book on the collapse of public health, will be ignored by the ...Administration, which appears to have decided that real war is only between states, that energy is something to be increased, not moderated in use, and that real men do not concern themselves with ethnic conflict, small wars, or scarcity of any sort in the Third World.

As I reflect on this book, and its deep discussion of the details of existing and potential resources wars (it includes a very fine illustrative appendix of oil and natural gas conflicts, all current), I contemplate both my disappointment that the author and publisher did not choose to do more with geospatial visualization--a fold out map of the world with all the points plotted in color would have been an extraordinary value--and the immediate potential value of adding the knowledge represented by this book on resources and the Garrett book on public health threats--to the World Conflict & Human Rights Map 2000 published by PIOOM at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

What I really like about this book is its relevance, its authority, its utility. What I find frustrating about this book is that it is, like all books, an isolated fragment of knowledge that cannot easily be integrated and visualized. How helpful it would be, if US voters could see a geographic depiction of the world showing all that the author of this excellent work is trying to communicate, and on the same geographic depiction, see the military dollars versus the economic assistance dollars that the U.S. is or is not investing. The results would be shocking and could lead to political action as the community level, for what is clear to me from this book is that there is a huge disconnect between the real threat, our national security policies, and how we actually spend our foreign affairs, defense, and trade dollars from the taxpayers' pockets.

A trillion dollar tax cut, or a trillion dollar investment in deterrence through investments in natural resource stabilization and extension? Which would be of more lasting value to the seventh generation of our children? The author does not comment--one is left to read between the lines.

It is amazingly good book, the best book of this sort. In very dynamic and in the meantime precise manner author addresses perhaps the most important, complicated and troubling political matter of nova times. My congratulations to author.

Correspondent for Russian daily newspaper "Russian Courier" in the USA Sergey L. Lopatnikov

As a graduate student in political science, specifically international relations, I found Klare's analysis of the potential for resource-based conflict to be compelling. His take on the great oil race going on in the Caspian Basin cuts through the typical corporate and government spin-doctoring to tell the reader what is actuall going on -- big-power politics under the guise of "economic development." Moreover, Klare's stark description of just how dependent the industrialized world is on these highly unstable, resource-rich states should be a warning for all policy-makers regardless of their political leanings.

Finally, if one combines this book with Daniel Yergin's "The Prize", an in-depth history of the oil industry, and Robert Pelton's "The World's Most Dangerous Places", then one can quickly grasp the role that natural resouces, both in the past and present, has played in international relations.

Michael Klare, I would argue, has a better claim to being able to predict tomorrow's headlines than self-proclaimed "futurists" who absurdly forecast that computers are going to surpass human intelligence and take over the world in 30 years. That's assuming our civilization can still generate electricity reliably, of course, which I suspect will become increasingly problematic as the parts of the world with projectable militaries fight over the remaining fossil fuels supplies and waterways suitable for hydroelectric damming. Already North America faces the prospect of our pilot lights going out this winter because of a severe natural gas shortage, which portends even worse resource crises to come.

I came away from this book feeling really bad about the human prospect. The neo-con junta running the U.S. thinks it can solve America's problems by occupying the oil reserves in Southwest Asia, without any Plan B for dealing with the oil supply's eventual exhaustion. Meanwhile, people in the less developed, dry countries of the Nile Valley, the Tigris-Euphrates region and the Indus River have been mindlessly pumping out babies for generations well in excess of their death rates, and now find themselves facing catastrophic water shortages. In many rain-forested tropical countries, corrupt dictators and warlords have been stripping out their natural resources to sell to Western companies so they can buy the guns and supplies they need to keep their soldiers' loyalty and stay in power. I found this last part of Klare's account especially striking in light of all the free-market propaganda about the wonders of globalization. Despite the fiction that trade requires noncoercive, mutually consensual transactions all along the line from the producer to the eventual consumer, in the real world the "producers" of many luxury goods like diamonds and fine tropical woods use armed force (including private military companies, which Klare names) to extract these resources at the expense of local populations who want to keep their environments intact because their traditional livelihoods depend on them. Once these goods enter the global market, however, whatever blood spilled in producing them conveniently falls down the memory hole.

I would have given this book a 4-star rating, but Klare failed to show what's really going to happen if we don't deal with these resource problems rationally, especially the shrinking supplies of oil and gas. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been living on an artificial energy subsidy from fossil fuels that has allowed us to cheat environmental constraints on the human population by a factor of four to six. We face the likelihood of a massive Malthusian die-off once this subsidy is exhausted.

This is a clear and lucid account of the perils facing oil addicted societies, and those facing other shortages of water and other minerals. While the Middle East smolders, and while the burning of fossil fuels contributes to global warming, the US and its policy "leaders" increase our dependence on a resource that will increasingly provoke conflict and put coming generations in harm's way. This book also, intentionally or no, helps answer that post-9/11 question: Why do they hate us? In short, to satisfy the needs of our own economy and wastrel practices, we have helped repress and impoverish millions of innocents to our benefit. Our freedom, our prosperity have come in large measure at their expense, and this book clearly lays out the future venues where the bill from our policies will likely and finally come due and payable. This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and this book's contents, very strait laced, have the potential to create the outrage for a change of national direction. Must reading.

Warnings about limits to the world's resources being inadequate for humanity's appetite date back at least to the period in the 1970's, when rising oil prices and lines at the pump provided a stark lesson in constraints for the American public. That public awareness has been re-awakened now under similar and perhaps more terminal circumstances. But there are strong indications that an understanding and focus on resource limits has been at the background of government actions for the past three decades and even earlier, despite an outward downplaying of the issue.

Michael Klare's book concentrates first on the issue of petroleum resources, a key flash point in the modern world. Access to petroleum is itself central to modern warfare, and those who control oil have used the revenue to build up their own military capabilities. Aside from American and Iraqi actions in the Middle East, actual conflicts have been limited to minor skirmishes thus far, but the build-up of arms is an ominous sign, as oil becomes scarcer and more valuable.

In the Persian Gulf, Klare documents the decades of first British and then American involvement, propping up friendly regimes and selling vast quantities of advanced weaponry. The expenditures on American might, even before the Iraq occupation (Klare's book was first published before even the September 11, 2001 attacks) have been astronomical; the US Central Command and Fifth Fleet exist largely to protect American interests (oil) in the Gulf region. The outcome of all that spending is pretty clear too: utter failure. Iran was long ago lost to American influence. Iraq seems likely to follow Iran; at the least, American efforts there have only resulted in lower, not higher, oil production. Saudi Arabia and many of the others are unstable, with super-wealthy upper classes threatened by religious fundamentalists and the poor, who only resent perceived American domination of their countrys' affairs.

Klare also reviews the interesting story of US policy in the Caspian region; developments since the Afghanistan war in that region have brought it even more under US influence since Klare wrote. The potential vast oil reserves there and in the South China Sea have brought major nations face to face with one another, staking out claims and influence, but so far avoiding outright war. Klare's discussion suggests that relative peace will not long continue: at some point the resources become valuable enough to risk large-scale combat, with outcomes likely bad for everybody.

Beyond oil, Klare discusses water resources extensively, particularly the Nile, but also a number of other cases where a major fresh water supply is divided among several nations. For rivers, upstream nations can take advantage of the geography to exploit as much of the water as they dare; in some cases only threats from more powerful downstream neighbors (such as Egypt for the Nile) keep the urge to divert water in check.

Other resources have also sparked conflict, in some cases civil war rather than war between nations: diamonds, precious metals and other ores, forests, and so forth. This seems to be particularly a problem in Africa where Klare discusses several recent examples. The existence of the resource draws in money that can be used to buy military capabilities; conflict seems to almost inevitably ensue.

In some respects, Klare seems to overstate the case. In briefly discussing possible solutions to all this, he seems to believe that only international institutions making allocation decisions for scarce resources would be able to tackle the problem. But one wonders - why are we trying to win by force what we can just buy in free markets with money? For instance, Iranian oil is essentially the same as oil from any other nation, it enters as additional supply in the world market and therefore has the net effect of lowering per barrel costs to US consumers. So what does it matter that the US has no influence over Iran these days? And if the foreigners who control oil raise prices for us, all the better for the alternatives we know we're going to need eventually anyway.

Many of the resource problems are a matter of ill-defined boundaries that could be resolved by some sort of international boundary disputes court, surely simpler than an international resource allocation system.

This all suggests that the real motives of governments striving to obtain influence over resource-rich regions is not the benefit of their own people, but the enrichment of certain segments of their society: those who profit more directly from resource extraction activities. Or, assuming stupidity instead of conspiracy, it could simply be an irrational need for control pushing governments in these directions. In either case Klare's book worryingly sets the stage for major global conflict over resources in coming years.

This book was particularly helpful because it filled an information gap, especially in regards to entertaining feuds over the rather esoteric, tiny Spratley Islands, as well as the importance of water rights. There are sections concerning water rights disputes in Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan vs. India. Of course, plenty of space is given to various oil and gas reserves, including the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus region. The maps were clear and very helpful. Readers will also enjoy the tables that include the innumerable purchases of US military equipment by Saudi Arabia. This book will continue to be valuable as countries vie for the resources of inner Eurasia.

Mr. Klare has written an excellent book about the conflicts to come in the future who will, to a large extent, be based on the scarcity of natural resources.

Most would think of oil when discussing conflicts over resources but as Mr. Klare shows most conflicts will actually be spawned by such basic neccesities as water and arrable land. Furthermore, Mr. Klare gives a wonderful account of how natural resources, or rather the lack thereof, have caused havoc in Africa and Asia.

It is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand the fundamentals behind conflict in the psot 9/11 world.