War and Resources

One thing that occurred to me this morning upon reading Andrew Leonard's latest post at How the World Works at Salon was how wrong those who predicted resource wars have been. The standard claim, grossly oversimplifying, is that as resources run out, countries would go to war to secure resources necessary to their economies. Resources like oil. I personally do not know if we are at peak oil or not. I just don't feel qualified to make that determination. I do know, however, that the United States is not going to fight wars to secure oil in the future. The basic calculus has to be the cost of a war to secure oil versus the price of alternatives to an oil based economy. The reality is that the cost of war, including the physical costs and reputational costs, is simply too high for such a war to be an effective instrument of policy. It will simply be cheaper to develop alternatives in the United States and on the world market than to use an expensive blunt instrument of state policy such as war to secure energy for the economy of the future.

What of the Iraq war? I know many on the left see the Iraq war as exactly the type of war I am saying will never happen. The fact of the matter is that the primary motivations for the Iraq War did not develop out of the board rooms of the administration's oil buddies, but instead came from the think tanks of the neoconservative hawks. The claimed benefit of using Iraqi oil to pay our costs in the was not a motivating factor, but instead just some lagniappe.