Resource Wars: An Interview with Michael Klare

Last year Bill Gates went through 4.7 million gallons of water -- nearly 60 times the consumption of a typical homeowner. His water bill was $24,828. He probably gladly paid it (or more likely never saw it), and it made the news not because Americans face water shortages but because the bill ranks decently high among outrageous consumption stories.

But according to Michael Klare, director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, such news may soon be cause for alarm.

Klare's new book, Resource Wars, argues that resources -- water, timber, minerals and especially oil -- will be the main cause of strife in the post-Cold War era. Although domination of resources has always been central to government strategy, Klare believes this will become more true as the world population grows and resources become depleted.

Gone will be the days of war waged for ideology. In its place will emerge a battle of economic interests with the earth's natural resources as the ultimate trophy.

This may sound overly simplistic, but resource competitions are already sparking tension and conflict in every corner of the globe. The motivation behind the Persian Gulf War -- protection of U.S. oil interests in the Middle East -- is the best known example.

Yet it is not the only one. Klare shows that the U.S. government (and foreign governments as well) are currently shifting their foreign policy strategy away from technology and alliance politics to oil-field protection and defense of maritime trade routes in the Caspian Sea region, the South China Sea, the offshore oil fields of Africa and, of course, the Persian Gulf.

Take the CIA. In 1997, it staged a simulated combat mission against "renegade forces" in southern Kazakhstan. The CENTRAZBAT 97 war game included the longest airborne operation in human history -- flying troops some 7,700 miles from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Such a military exercise was economical in the eyes of the Clinton administration, as the Caspian Sea region is believed to house approximately 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or one-eighth of the world's gas reserves.

To secure access to oil in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Klare reports the U.S. government has been just as willing to make huge investments. Between 1990 and 1997, the U.S. provided these oil-rich countries over $42 billion in arms and ammunition -- the largest and most costly transfer of military equipment in recent history.

Resource Wars is full of such information about oil politics. It also looks at a much less talked-about resource: water. Klare predicts countries that share major water arteries -- like the Nile, the Jordan, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus -- may well come to blows over this increasingly scarce resource. He is not alone in this opinion. "The next war in our region," observed then-Egyptian foreign minister Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1998, "will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics."

AlterNet talked to Michael Klare about his new book and what may be the next great shift in international relations.

How did you come to write resource wars?

Michael Klare: My interest in resource conflict grew out of the work I was doing in the 1990s on the international trade in conventional weapons. During the Cold War, this trade was largely governed by the military rivalry between the two superpowers. When the Cold War ended, however, new trade patterns began to develop. In attempting to analyze these patterns, I was repeatedly struck by the relationship between arms transfers and resource issues. Whether in the South China Sea area, the Caspian basin or Africa, there seemed to be a direct link between resource competition and the procurement of arms. This triggered my interest in resource issues, and I got so fascinated by the topic that I decided to write a book on it.