U.S. foreign energy policy and grand strategy choice : the challenge of global and regional systemic crises

Abstract

U.S. foreign energy strategy is here situated relative to a choice between an entrenched 'global hegemonism' and an alternative grand strategy geared to a multi-polarising world. This broader strategic alternative is characterized as a form of 'cooperative realism' or 'off-shore balancing', but extended to provide a sound basis for addressing a series of interconnected global, regional and domestic systemic crises.The first of these crises is in the global security system itself. The comparative lack of external 'checks and balances' on U.S. power in the present unipolar system is unstable and dangerous, not least in exacerbating real threats from Islamist extremism. An unreconstructed U.S. hegemonism might defer some multi-polarising trends militarily, but without proper regard to costs and with often counter-productive consequences. Underlying this postulated strategic binary choice has been internationally uneven economic development complicated by the global financial-economic crisis since late 2008, originating especially in the US itself and with important energy-related causal features. A third systemic crisis, with a longer time-scale, is that of 'dangerous' climate change, requiring imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions-especially from the global energy sector, itself a fourth system in crisis. Effective management of these four global crises requires the U.S. also to address a series of critical issues in domestic policy. These require reforms in budgetary and economic policy (budgetary and national debts and deficits), but also in domestic energy policy, interacting as it does with foreign (energy) policy and with commitments to avert 'dangerous' climate change. Reciprocally, an alternative grand strategy of international retrenchment and 'cooperative realism' could be essential to address domestic problems. The U.S. also has scope to gain from technology and policy leadership by (domestic) example in such fields as energy strategy and averting climate change. The global energy system is characterized by the rising demand for oil, including various alternatives to conventional crude, especially from strongly growing China and India. These demand trends run up against supplies increasingly from a few regions characterized by instability, leading to disruptive price shocks in tight oil markets. The supply-side focus thus turns to the oil-and gas-rich Persian Gulf and U.S. management or mismanagement thereof. Analysis then moves to the oil-related causes and consequences of the 2003 Iraq war, and to energy-related aspects of the problem of Iran-the strategic position of which seems to have been strengthened as an unintended effect of that U.S.-initiated war. As the world's second largest source of natural gas, also well located in relation to Asian markets, Iran could supply China with gas, cost-effectively reducing its CO2 emissions, but this option is blocked by the long-standing US-Iranian confrontation. The broader Eurasian regional context includes both important markets for oil and gas as well as the dominant global sources. The region includes the major rising powers driving the trend to multipolarity. An alternative U.S. grand strategy toward Eurasia, so broadly defined, thus also should prompt a re-think of U.S. energy strategy. The conclusion includes a review of energy-related US constituencies potentially supportive of such an alternative grand strategy. Show more