Sacramento Permaculture Guild

While terrorism, and the struggle to defeat it, has dominated much of the post-9/11 security debate, a new faultline underlying world politics has gained attention in recent years, one that could increasingly define our future conflicts. This faultline is defined by natural resources: who's got them, who needs them, and who has the means to secure them.

Indeed, resource conflict and its inescapable logic appears to explain many of the strategic moves made by the United States in recent years, and in particular its efforts to transform the political landscape of the Middle East, home to the world's largest petroleum energy reserves. Opponents of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq often utter the phrase "No blood for oil," suggesting that energy resources, and not counter-terrorism, might lie at the root of America's Iraq war policy. But it's not just anti-war slogans that suggest the hidden hand of geopolitics underlying our current conflict: indeed, many experts of international conflict see international competition for increasingly scarce natural and energy resources as a core, and increasingly salient, cause of conflict between and within states.

Michael T. Klare, the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, is one of the world's leading experts on resource conflict. He sees natural resources at the heart of conflicts past, present and future. A prolific writer and analyst, he is author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2001) and more recently, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Henry Holt & Co., 2005). His newest book on this issue, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy is due out in April 2008.

Strategic Insights had the opportunity to interview Professor Klare, to gain insight into the causal link between natural resources and international conflict, and to better understand this increasingly important faultline in world politics.