Michael Lynch: What Did You Do In The Oil War, Daddy?

The past decade with its commodity supercycle and growing environmental concerns has revived fears that some combination of resource scarcity and environmental degradation will or has increased the likelihood of military conflict. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times argues that the current flood of refugees into Europe reflects three big factors, one of which is Mother Nature, including climate change, loss of biodiversity and population growth. Timothy Snyder’s new book on World War II, the Holocaust and related tragedies, in part argues that the desire for resources motivated Hitler’s aggression.

The peak oil believers certainly seized on the notion that scarcity of petroleum would lead to greater conflict, and books like Resource Wars promoted the idea. Most tellingly, many still believe we invaded Iraq in 2003 to get oil, even though we had oil before the war, we haven’t gotten any Iraqi oil after the war, and we still have all the oil we need. And then some.

To a degree, this harks back to the Realist school of International Relations, with its Hobbesian view that sees war as driven, to be colloquial, by hormones and stuff. Men have a tendency for aggression to uphold their honor (the polite way of putting it), and they want things, which they intend to get by taking them from others.

Thus you have both Germans and Japanese militaries in World War II driving for oil fields in their respective regions or more generally, Hitler’s desire for Lebensraum, or “living space”. The great colonial expansion of the late 19th century by European countries was seen in part as a search for raw materials to feed home industries, although the search for markets was probably more often a greater impulse. Of course, a neo-Malthusian worldview isn’t required for aggression. The earlier recorded international aggression that I know of was an Egyptian invasion of Nubia seeking women and cattle roughly 4,500 years ago. Both of those were renewable resources and apparently not scarce, but simply valuable.

There is, of course, a huge fallacy behind all this, namely that military action is a) necessary to acquire resources and b) a cost-effective approach to doing so. Postwar Germany is proof of this; its energy and oil needs have expanded greatly, but they have had no trouble acquiring supplies. In the case of Germany and Japan during World War II, the extent to which military action was necessitated to acquire resources was the result of their military aggression.

Unfortunately, foreign policy is driven by perceptions, which can easily be at odds with reality. Remarks like “Hitler needed the natural resources, manpower and living space of the Soviet Union to secure Germany’s position as a world power.” are odd, since postwar Germany has become a global power (ask Greece) without military efforts or even the diplomatic efforts that countries like France have expended to gain “access” to oil supplies.

Neo-Malthusian views remain popular in many governments, and certainly academia, despite the failure of both the Limits to Growth model and the peak oil theories. Chinese claims on the South China Sea may not be primarily the result of presumed petroleum and marine resources, but they probably play a role. But resource economists should strive to educate governments as to the value of trade over conflict in promoting not just the acquisition of raw materials but power more generally.

Forbes