The National Interest

RISING ENERGY prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have animated fears that the world may be headed for a spate of “resource wars”—hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources. Such fears come in many stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells especially loudly in three areas. First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of the resources it needs—such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals—and has already “gone out” to the world with the goal of securing what it wants. Violent conflicts may follow as the country shunts others aside. A second potential path down the road to resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-rich countries. Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which could multiply stresses on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about mass migrations.
Most of this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy. Classic resource wars are good material for Hollywood screenwriters. they rarely occur in the real world. to be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong some conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing them requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do arise, the weak link isn’t a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance.

Now we hear from Victor’s critics, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Klare, Sherri Goodman and Paul Kern. they tackle him on everything, from climate change to the impact of oil shortages and the mass spread of disease. Victor has the last word.

Straw Man in the Wind

Thomas Homer-Dixon

PUNDITS, JOURNALISTS and Sunday morning news show commentators sometimes say silly things about the links between resources and war. “Iraq is all about oil” or “Global warming caused the Darfur genocide.” And, sometimes, NGO leaders and policymakers say similar silly things when they want the media to pay attention to a particular region or issue. It’s easy to criticize these statements. But thoughtful commentators, of whom David Victor is normally one, know they contribute little by doing so. Yet, in this case, he’s pulled together several oft-heard arguments about why threats from resource wars are overblown. Some of the skeptical positions have merit, but many are deeply misleading. No serious scholar of this issue says that resource stress causes violence by itself; almost none asserts that the causal links between resource stress and violence are direct; and very few argue that interstate war is the most likely outcome. Resource stresses are security dangers, though they are one among many. They will not be the only cause of conflict, but they will add to the risk of war.

If you listen to Victor, though, you might just get lulled into a false sense of security. He beats down straw-man arguments, in the end offering nothing but false reassurances about the security risks posed by resource stress. If the author had been willing to take on nuance, he wouldn’t have been able to write the kind of simplistic and ideologically charged article that appeared in these pages. That’s because serious scholars who have spent years studying the links between resources and mass violence—and I count myself in that group—rarely, if ever, make the kinds of arguments Victor so boldly attacks.

Rather, we argue that resource stress always interacts in complex conjunction with a host of other factors—ecological, institutional, economic and political—to cause mass violence. Also, causation is almost always indirect. People, groups and countries rarely fight over natural resources directly; instead, resource stress causes various forms of social dislocation—including widening gaps between rich and poor, increased rent-seeking by elites, weakening of states and deeper ethnic cleavages—that, in turn, make violence more likely. And, finally, this violence is almost always sub-national; it takes the form of insurgency, rebellion, gangsterism and urban criminality, not overt interstate war.

The claim that resource stress is sufficient by itself to cause violence is easily refuted. One simply has to identify cases where resource stress was present but violence didn’t occur. Likewise, the claim that resource stress is a necessary cause of violence is easily refuted by finding cases of violence not preceded by resource stress. At various points in his article, Victor uses exactly these strategies to debunk the link between resources and war.

If resource stress causes violence in complex interaction with other factors, a much more nuanced refutation than what Victor offers is required. It’s all about context. Careful analyses of specific cases are needed. Darfur is just one example. Here, the host of factors contributing to the violence and the tangled relationships among these factors are carefully identified, one by one. A critic who wants to refute this kind of claim needs to take on the facts of the case itself and marshal empirical evidence to challenge the claim’s specifics. This exercise is hard, and it takes time.

Victor doesn’t engage with this type of voluminous work. My research team and others around the world have undertaken painstaking analyses of cases as diverse as the Philippines, Pakistan, Haiti and South Africa. This research has shown that severe resource stress—including water scarcity, forest loss, land degradation and collapse of coastal fisheries—multiplies the impact of a society’s existing vulnerabilities, including its ethnic cleavages and skewed distribution of land, wealth and power. Rural folk who depend directly on the local environment for their day-to-day livelihoods become poorer, while powerful elites manipulate laws to gain control of—and extract exorbitant rents from—increasingly valuable land, forests and water. As these resources dwindle in the countryside, people sometimes join local insurgencies against landowners and government officials. Other times, they migrate in large numbers to regions where resources seem more plentiful, only to fight with people who already inhabit those regions. They might also migrate to urban slums, where unemployed young men, especially, can be primed to join criminal gangs or radical political groups.

In light of these findings, Victor too quickly dismisses the security dangers of climate change. “Serious thinking about climate change”, he writes, “must recognize that the ‘hard’ security threats that are supposedly lurking are mostly a ruse.” Yet, the recent report of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies multiple pathways through which global warming will hurt poor people in the Third World and hinder economic development there more generally. Large swaths of land in subtropical latitudes—zones inhabited by billions of people—will experience more drought, more coastal damage from storms, higher mortality from heat waves, worse outbreaks of agricultural pests and an increased burden of infectious disease. The potential impact on food output is a particular concern: In semi-arid regions where water is already scarce and cropland overused, climate change could devastate agriculture. Also, many cereal crops in tropical zones are already near their limits of heat tolerance, and even a couple degrees warming could lead to much lower yields.

By weakening rural economies, boosting unemployment and dislocating people’s lives, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable poor countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate changes will undermine already frail governments—and make challenges from violent groups more likely—by reducing government revenues, increasing the economic clout of rent-seeking elites, overwhelming bureaucracies with problems and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens. We’ve learned in recent years that this kind of societal failure can have consequences around the world and that great powers can’t always isolate themselves from these consequences. So climate change could readily produce “hard security threats” by any reasonable definition of the phrase.

At one point, Victor does acknowledge the reality of such complex causation: “Resource-related conflicts are multi-causal”, he writes. But then he immediately draws a misleading conclusion from this fact: Because resource-related conflicts are multi-causal, he goes on, “primal ‘resource wars’ can never exist.” Here he sets up, once again, a straw man. No serious analyst of resource-related conflict would say any conflict is exclusively about resources.

Implicit in Victor’s argument here is the notion that if a conflict has multiple causes, and if resource stress is one of these causes, then resource stress is probably not particularly important. The real cause is probably “deeper” and likely involves governmental or institutional failure. For instance, he writes:

Some analysts have pointed to conflicts over resources, including water and valuable land, as a cause in the Rwandan genocide. . . .Recently, the UN secretary-general suggested that climate change was already exacerbating the conflicts in Sudan. But none of these supposed causal chains stays linked under close scrutiny—the conflicts over resources are usually symptomatic of deeper failures in governance. . . .Climate is just one of many factors that contribute to tension.

Yet Victor provides absolutely no evidence or argument to justify either his substantive claims about Rwanda or Darfur or his sweeping assertion that failures in governance are ultimately the most important cause of these conflicts. How can he speak with such confidence? Is he an expert on these cases? What metric is he using to differentiate between the causal “weight” of different factors—resource, governmental, institutional or otherwise?

On the specifics of Rwanda, he is, in fact, decisively wrong: Several exacting and penetrating studies have now shown conclusively that cropland scarcity in Rwanda strongly affected rural grievances that were exploited by radical Hutus in the lead-up to the 1994 genocide. And regarding Darfur, the case is by no means closed one way or the other. We’re still waiting for a close on-the-ground analysis of causation. But many reputable scholars have argued, on the basis of substantial evidence, that a long-term decline in rainfall in the Darfur region contributed to a breakdown—which the Khartoum government exploited, to be sure—of traditional relations between nomads and pastoralists.

Victor’s unsubstantiated assertions here betray a too-common bias of social scientists: The forces of nature are ultimately subordinate to the forces of society. But the world is now too complex—and too multifactoral—for such social-science grandstanding. All this can’t hide that we’ll have war, social dislocation, weakening of rural economies, widening gaps between rich and poor, deepening ethnic cleavages—and that resource stresses play an important role.

Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Island Press, 2006).

Clearing the Air

Michael T. Klare

“WHAT RESOURCE Wars?” performs a worthwhile service by provoking debate about the role of resource competition in contemporary world affairs. Yet, as a window into the reality of resource-related violence, it comes up short.

Victor’s missteps are partly methodological. He too narrowly defines “resource wars” as “hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources.” This classification severely underestimates the number of worldwide resource-driven battles. What’s more, the sort of wars he depicts—the staple of European imperialism—may have become less frequent in the modern era, but they have hardly disappeared. Surely Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait fits his definition—a resource “grab” that was only reversed after intervention by a half-million U.S. troops. But this is not the type of resource conflict that has most troubled the planet in recent times.

By failing to address the role of resource revenues as a motive for war, Victor leaves out a large share of the armed violence now racking the planet. In reality, we have experienced a spate of internal conflicts over control of valuable oil fields, copper mines and what Paul Collier has called “lootable resources”—diamonds, old-growth timber and other valuable commodities that can be smuggled out of the country and sold on lucrative foreign markets. Conflicts of this sort typically pit corrupt central governments against warlords, ethnic militias, separatist groups, criminal organizations and other non-state actors. Ultimately, each group seeks to garner the rents generated by ownership of the mines or oil fields in question or to monopolize the illicit trade in lootable commodities.

Some of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts to occur in the past 25 years fit this description, including those in Congo-Brazzaville, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan. Many other recent conflicts share these features, though ethnic, religious and political differences may be the central provocations—in Angola, Chad and Colombia, for example. And Victor’s myopia is particularly striking in its failure to mention two conflicts of particular concern to the United States: the sectarian struggle in Iraq and the insurgency in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

The internal fighting in Iraq, of course, has many sources, some going back centuries to the original schism between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims and the divide between Kurds and Arabs. But control of oil plays a major part in the conflict. As is well known, Saddam Hussein favored the Sunnis at the expense of the others, using income derived from Iraq’s oil fields—almost all of which are located in Kurdish and Shi‘a areas—to create a Sunni middle class. Now most Kurds and many Shi‘a appear determined to create mini-states of their own, retaining control over all oil revenues generated within their respective territories. For many Sunnis, it is precisely the fear of being sidelined in this process—with no oil revenues at all—that is fueling their resentment of the Shi‘a-dominated government and prompting their support for the insurgency.

Anticipating Professor Victor’s rebuttal, I know this is not all that is at work here, but with the stakes so high, everything matters. The United States is failing in Iraq. The future of American power is at risk. Quelling the violence is one of our most daunting and lethal challenges. Ignoring the resource dimension entirely means ignoring one of the key factors in this conflict.

The situation in Nigeria also poses a significant problem for the United States. In their eagerness to reduce the nation’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, one U.S. president after another has extolled the benefits of greater reliance on African producers. By some optimistic accounts, West Africa—led by Nigeria—will provide one-fourth of America’s oil imports by 2015.

But all this assumes that Nigeria will be able to overcome its internal difficulties, and so far there is no evidence that this will occur. Most of Nigeria’s onshore oil is produced in the Niger River Delta, a swampy area abutting the Gulf of Guinea, whose poor inhabitants have long been mistreated by governing elites in Abuja, the nation’s capital. While some $200 billion in oil rents have poured into Abuja over the past forty years, almost nothing has trickled down to the delta region, which has suffered incalculable environmental damage from careless drilling practices. A stream of broken promises has led tribal militias in the delta—some tied to criminal organizations—to take up arms against the central government, attacking oil facilities and kidnapping foreign oil workers in a bitter campaign to extract a greater share of the oil wealth. The result has been a substantial drop in Nigerian oil output and a resultant increase in the global price of crude, now at near-historic highs.

These may not be “resource wars” as Victor sees them, but they are resource wars nonetheless. Their impact on our world is undeniably substantial.

Professor Victor’s other significant problem is an apparent unfamiliarity with the realities of global resource depletion. He devotes much of his article to China’s global quest for raw materials and the country’s unfortunate habit of searching for supplies in the “armpits of governance”, like Chad, Sudan and Zimbabwe. With encouragement from the United States, he contends, the Chinese can be steered away from such danger zones and be persuaded to invest in more stable countries, like Australia. This makes eminent sense, except for one thing: Most of the mines and oil fields in safe, stable parts of the world are exhausted, and most of what’s left can only be found in the “armpits of governance.”

Take oil. At one time, the United States was the world’s leading producer, along with such (then-)friendly states as Canada, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela. But times have changed. Production in the contiguous United States peaked in 1971 and is now running at about half that level. Likewise, most of these other states are in decline or soon will be—Canada’s environmentally destructive tar sands aside. Of the dozen or so countries out there with the capacity to boost production—notably Angola, Azerbaijan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nigeria, Russia and Sudan—virtually all are in the “armpit” category.

The same holds true for many vital minerals. The world’s largest producing copper mines, located in Chile and Indonesia, are now thought to be producing at their maximum sustainable rate and are liable to soon go into decline. Copper is key to many industrial applications, and so large consumers like China are scouring the world in search of new supplies. As it turns out, some of the world’s most promising new ore sites are located in arguably the mother of all armpits—the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). But this status has not deterred the Chinese from announcing a $5 billion investment in the DRC’s mining industry.

This development is so worrisome because China—like the United States—is marrying its investment in these troubled areas with arms and military assistance. Instability in these countries can clearly lead to resource disruption. Say what you will, government officials in both Beijing and Washington are plainly fearful that their growing reliance on these armpits of governance makes them vulnerable. In turn, that fear has led them to beef up the internal security forces of their favored suppliers. In justifying increased aid to Nigerian security forces, for example, the Bush Administration noted in 2006 that “Nigeria is the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports, and disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to U.S. oil security strategy.” Because the greatest risk of disruption occurs in the delta, “[U.S.] assistance supports efforts to increase security and stability in the vulnerable oil-producing Niger Delta region.” And escalating conflict paired with increased armaments is less than ideal.

There is a war under way in the Niger Delta region, a war fueled by resentment over the inequitable allocation of resource rents. The United States, driven by oil interests, is indirectly involved in this war by supplying arms and military expertise to the Nigerian forces involved in suppressing the insurgency. Likewise, China has been an indirect party to the conflict between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the rebels in the south, a conflict being fought over very similar issues. Could these be the harbingers of things to come, of growing U.S. and Chinese involvement in internal resource wars in unstable areas of the world? It is hard to know for sure, but “What Resource Wars?” doesn’t provide the background necessary to fully consider this question.

Michael T. Klare is the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Holt Paperbacks, 2002) and Blood and Oil (Holt Paperbacks, 2005). He is also the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, based at Hampshire College, and the defense correspondent of The Nation magazine.

Bad Tidings

Sherri W. Goodman & Paul J. Kern

WHILE WE agree with many of the points raised by David Victor in his article, “What Resource Wars?”, we are concerned that he underestimates the risks climate change poses to global stability and to our national security—risks addressed in our CNA-sponsored study, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. Far from scare tactics, the report reflects a simple tenet of military planning: Wars are best avoided by preparing ahead of time for potential threats; managing the risks.

When Victor argues that the weak link in preserving peace “isn’t a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance”, he misses the point. Ignoring serious climate problems on the horizon is a dearth of governance. Debates between different groups in the United States about the causes of conflict and climate change are not reasons to defer decision-making or delay action in planning for uncertain eventualities. In fact, it serves to highlight the potential vulnerabilities we face and the need to address them. One of the primary principles of U.S. national security is that we take prudent action to reduce risks and threats. Paying no heed to even potential threats recklessly rejects that principle.

The evidence mounts daily that an extreme weather event could cause key states already suffering from a dearth of governance to spiral out of control. A rise in sea level or water loss from dwindling glaciers could be the trigger. One need only consider the inadequacy of the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing chaos, loss of life and damage to homes in order to recognize that many regions of the world simply do not have the capacity to cope with multiple major natural disasters wrought, in part, by climate change.

Adopting a dismissive attitude, Victor declares that “serious thinking about climate change must recognize that the ‘hard’ security threats that are supposedly lurking are mostly a ruse.” Putting aside the fact that Victor seems to be hedging his bets by using the word “mostly”, he again misses a key security-related point. Although global climate change may fall well short of directly spurring armed conflict, it acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world—and that may affect U.S. national security.

Weakened states in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, already struggling to provide for their citizens’ basic needs, will wrestle with the effects of global climate change. Natural and humanitarian disasters, consequences of climate change, will “likely foster political instability where societal demands exceed the capacity of governments to cope”, as our report explains. All this exacerbates resource shortfalls and hinders progress toward better governance.

This instability hits close to home. It is conceivable that if the effects of climate change are left unaddressed, the U.S. role in these troubled areas will have to increase. The United States may be drawn into these failing states more often to provide relief and help stave off potential armed conflicts. Once a conflict has broken out, the United States may have to contribute to reconstruction and stabilization efforts.

As for his assertion that “water wars don’t happen”, Victor does not tell the whole story. While no recent wars have been waged solely over water, scarcity of agricultural land and competition for other resources were contributing factors to conflict and instability in Rwanda and Darfur in the 1990s and in Ethiopia and Nigeria in the 1970s. Whether resource scarcity will be the impetus for peaceful cooperation or a contributor to conflict in the future remains to be seen. Regions that are already water-scarce, such as Kuwait, Jordan, Israel, Rwanda, Somalia, Algeria and Kenya, may be forced to confront this choice as climate change exacerbates their water scarcity. And nations critical to global stability are expected to become water-scarce within several decades: Pakistan, South Africa, and large parts of China and India.

“Water wars” are not just disputes over wells or even about water, per se. They are about the consequences of a lack of water—consequences that are already being felt. Conflicts over access to vital resources are scattered throughout Africa. Darfur is the best recent example of, as we note in our report, how “existing marginal situations can be exacerbated beyond the tipping point by climate-related factors.” Here, drought led to competition for land that has access to water. When combined with existing issues like population growth and tribal, ethnic and religious disputes, the struggle for land turned violent. Is the Darfur conflict a classic “water war”? Perhaps not. But has a lack of water played a critical role in that tragedy? Absolutely.

A consideration of the potential impact of global climate change on water resources also forces us to think about the fate of regions of the world not included in today’s definition of “trouble spots.” The source of some of Asia’s major rivers—the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow—is the Himalayan ice sheet. Should glaciers there continue to melt, as our report details, “the water supply of much of Asia” will diminish drastically.

And take Peru, which is already in a fragile state with limited experience with democracy, frequent bouts of insurgency, and continuing border disputes with Chile and Ecuador. Most of Peru’s water comes from glacial melt, which is predicted to disappear within a decade or so. How will Peru’s 27 million people cope with a lack of fresh water? Will they become unwelcome immigrants to Peru’s neighbors where tensions already exist? The questions are serious, and the likelihood of trouble is very real.

Victor also shrugs off the potential spread of diseases due to global climate change and the resulting impact on the health of major populations, calling such scenarios “good fodder for the imagination.” But he is simply off the mark. Such concerns aren’t non-issues for those professionals charged with protecting human health, such as the Center for Disease Control’s director, Julie Gerberding. In fact, she has testified, “It is not a question of whether there will be health effects from global warming, but a reality of who, where, when, and how.” And in its 2005 report Global Climate Change and Health, the World Heath Organization raised concerns over a significant spreading of the conditions for vector-borne diseases, such as dengue fever and malaria, and such food-borne diseases as salmonellosis.

Victor isn’t all wrong, though. He is very much on target in his view that “if resource wars are actually rare—and when they do exist, they are part of a complex of causal factors—then much of the conventional wisdom about resource policies needs fresh scrutiny.” He also posits the sensible opinion that when taken all together, the potential ill effects of global climate change scenarios “are truly disturbing” and then adds, in seeming contradiction to the rest of his argument, “meaningful action to stem the dangers is long overdue.”

Action is needed. In our report, the Military Advisory Board (MAB) offered concrete measures to begin to address the threats posed by climate change. The national-security consequences of climate change are real. In order to effectively combat these effects, they must be integrated into national-security and national-defense strategies. The United States must work more intensely on a national and international level and develop global partnerships to help less-developed countries prepare for climate change. The Department of Defense must also make important adjustments. Our military leaders must assess the impact of global change on U.S. military installations, and adopt new business processes and innovative technologies to improve energy efficiency and, in turn, U.S. combat power.

And politicians do, as Victor says, “give more attention to imagined insecurities from climate change and rarely talk about climate as a game of odds and risk management.” But those are critical components of sensible planning, and the MAB’s recommendations are focused on precisely those principles: risk management and prudent action to apply the principles and approaches of threat assessment to climate change.

The answer to Victor’s question, “What Resource Wars?”, is “The ones we must act now to avoid.” This was the hallmark of America’s Cold War security strategy of containment, which sought to reduce the risk of the Soviet use of nuclear weapons and other military threats. In the post–Cold War age of insecurity, we should act now to reduce the risks of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing clean energy futures, and helping vulnerable nations develop capacity and resiliency to cope with the inevitable effects of our changing climate.

Sherri W. Goodman, former deputy under secretary of defense, is CNA general counsel and the executive director of the CNA Military Advisory Board. Paul J. Kern, former commanding general of the U.S. Army Material Command, is a member of the CNA Military Advisory Board.

Smoke and Mirrors

David G. Victor

MY ARGUMENT is that classic resource wars—hot conflicts driven by a struggle to grab resources—are increasingly rare. Even where resources play a role, they are rarely the root cause of bloodshed. Rather, the root cause usually lies in various failures of governance. That argument—in both its classic form and in its more nuanced incarnation—is hardly a straw man, as Thomas Homer-Dixon asserts. Setting aside hyperbole, the punditry increasingly points to resources as a cause of war. And so do social scientists and policy analysts, even with their more nuanced views. I’ve triggered this debate because conventional wisdom puts too much emphasis on resources as a cause of conflict. Getting the story right has big implications for social scientists trying to unravel cause-and-effect and often even larger implications for public policy.

Michael Klare is right to underscore Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the only classic resource conflict in recent memory. That episode highlights two of the reasons why classic resource wars are becoming rare—they’re expensive and rarely work. (And even in Kuwait’s case, many other forces also spurred the invasion. Notably, Iraq felt insecure with its only access to the sea a narrow strip of land sandwiched between Kuwait on one side and its archenemy Iran on the other.) In the end, Saddam lost resources on the order of $100 billion (plus his country and then his head) in his quest for Kuwait’s 1.5 million barrels per day of combined oil and gas output. By contrast, Exxon paid $80 billion to get Mobil’s 1.7 million barrels per day of oil and gas production—a merger that has held and flourished. As the bulging sovereign wealth funds are discovering, it is easier to get resources through the stock exchange than the gun barrel.

Klare takes me to task for failing to acknowledge the role of “lootable” resources as a motive for war. My point is that looters loot what they can—not just natural resources, but also foreign aid and anything else that passes within reach. (Paul Collier’s research, which Klare cites for support, finds that a sizeable share of African military budgets is, in effect, aid money that is looted and redirected from foreign aid.) I suspect that we don’t differ much in our assessment of the effects of lootable resources within weak and failed states, but where we do part company is in the implication for policy. Fixing the problems in the Niger River Delta—the case he uses—requires a stronger and more accountable government. That means making it harder to loot resources, taming official corruption, lending a hand with law enforcement in places where oil is produced and stolen, and engaging reformist forces in the Nigerian government. Resource looting and misallocation are severe, but they are symptoms whose cures require focusing on governance.

The realities of global resource depletion are somewhat different from Klare’s story. It is true that primary resources, such as oil in the ground, are now more concentrated in “armpit” countries because more readily available resources are being depleted. That fact, though, only serves to further support my conclusion: That we must redouble our efforts to improve governance because all oil-consuming countries have a stake in the good governance of their oil producers. What really matters is not theoretical oil thousands of feet underground but actual oil produced and delivered to markets. And on that front, the armpit-country story isn’t so bad because those countries tend to put themselves out of business. Witness Venezuela, where production is declining even though the country is one of the world’s richest in untapped resources. High prices soon follow. And with those higher prices, a spate of “new” resources becomes viable—oil sands in Canada and shale in the western United States, for example. Moreover, many oil-rich countries actually have good governance systems (at least concerning their oil), such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and notably the bright new star among oil-majors, Brazil. Nonetheless, I echo a conclusion from my original article—one that Klare surely shares as well—that current patterns of oil consumption are not sustainable, and urgent efforts to tame demand are also needed.

StrawManSymposium

I find it striking that none of the three have attacked my characterization of China’s behavior in Africa, for it is the Chinese resource scramble that most animates fear among the punditry and threat industry of a coming resource war. My original article makes a strong argument for why the conventional wisdom about China is wrong and why all oil consumers (including China and the United States) actually have strong common interests. If, indeed, that argument is widely shared among experts then some radically different policy strategies would follow.

Nobody can disagree with Paul Kern and Sherri Goodman’s maxim that “wars are best avoided by preparing ahead of time for potential threats. . . .” My concern isn’t with the principle but, rather, putting this bromide into practice—exactly what they accuse me of ignoring. Just as Eisenhower warned of the industrial threat industry at the end of his administration, so too must we be concerned about the arrival of military planning to the problem of natural resources. These are broader concerns I have flagged, not specifically directed at CNA (Kern and Goodman’s organization), and they merit careful attention because the generous instinct of environmentalists is to welcome all who share concern about resource depletion and stress. Yet, the threat industry is notoriously bad at setting priorities for interventions that involve the broader society and economy.

The CNA report they cite (and co-authored) rightly says that climate change is a threat multiplier, but all stresses on governance systems are threat multipliers, and real security policy is about setting priorities and matching responses to threats. I have a feeling that we agree on the implications for policy, although for different reasons. I am not much worried about climate change triggering hot conflict, but I am deeply concerned about the unequal impacts on poor societies and the severe impacts on fragile ecosystems. The solutions include deep cuts in emissions (exactly how that can be done is a subject I have addressed for most of my professional career) and also much better governance systems, so that societies do a better job of coping with the changes in climate that are inevitable. Thinking about climate change as a security problem inspires a logic of hardening, securing and protecting. What’s really needed is flexibility, adaptiveness and fair systems of governance—all conclusions that are broadly consistent with the CNA report.

Homer-Dixon’s critique is unabashedly misleading and wrong. Like Kern and Goodman he makes much of the “hard security” dangers in climate change—imagining all manner of ways that climate disturbances can ripple into hot conflicts. Such thinking is pernicious. Good imagination can find threat multipliers everywhere. Good policy is about setting priorities where leverage is greatest. Looking only at the disturbances—weakened rural economies, increased unemployment, dislocated people—just perverts policy. The world is already destined to face a lot of climate change that won’t be reversed for a century or more. So now, we must look not only at avoiding disturbances but also at improving governance. (At the same time, we must be modest in realizing that outsiders often have little useful leverage on how countries govern themselves.)

He claims that I have ignored complex causation when, in fact, that’s the centerpiece of my argument, and it is precisely the voluminous work in this area that gives me trouble. The problems in Darfur and Rwanda stem from many factors, but what matters for social science, and especially for policy, is getting cause and effect right. Indeed, radical Hutus pointed to resource inequities to mobilize support, but radicals, like looters, make do with whatever irredentism is available. Had someone reallocated the cropland, the problem would not have disappeared. Hutu grievance was rooted in Rwanda’s system of governance-by-minority, the inability of that governance system to make decisions that commanded broad respect, and ultimately, the inability of those in power to provide security.

Nearly all of the vast literature that Homer-Dixon applauds suffers from the affliction of severe selection bias and failure to assign proper weights to causal factors. Put a microscope on any big conflict looking for resources, and you’re sure to find exactly what you’re looking for. Nobody doubts that causation is complex; the dispute is on the central forces. And to Klare’s point about methodology, my article focuses narrowly on hot conflict—that is, “war”—because the best way to get causation right usually requires starting narrowly. However, technological change and economic shifts away from resource-intensive industries and the globalization of most resources into commodities implies that a broader version of my hypothesis probably also holds—natural resources matter less and thus are less important for conflict, except where lootable resources coincide with exceptionally poor governance.

Homer-Dixon is particularly upset that I seem to diminish the multitude of causes for conflict. My essay does not portray a Candide of peace and endless prosperity. The world is a dangerous place; conflicts are rife; important problems, such as climate change, are mounting for lack of more serious policy attention. Looking at all these problems through conflict-colored lenses is equally dangerous, for it focuses attention on weak symptoms rather than root causes.

David G. Victor is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a book on new strategies for managing global warming, parts of which appear in the December issue of Scientific American.