Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
The environment and military security
The idea that some issues of environmental change should be considered the stuff
of high politics, because they can have knock-on military effects, became influential
in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War, again, was significant in widening the focus
of foreign policy-makers to see dangers other than that facing them at the other
side of the balance of terror ‘seesaw’, but the roots of this idea can be traced back to
the rise of concerns about securing key economic resources in the 1970s.
The Oil Crises of 1973–74 and 1979 (when OPEC raised prices in the wake of
the Iranian revolution) shook international relations practically and academically.
The academic dominance of Classical Realism, which stressed the uppermost
primacy of military power in calculating the ‘national interest’ by which state foreign
policy should be guided, was toppled by a recognition of the importance of economic
power in state relations. Neo-Realists, such as Waltz (1979), revamped the old paradigm
to accommodate non-military components of power into its competitive logic
of accounting for state relations. At the same time Pluralists, such as Keohane and
Nye (1977), felt vindicated that a more cooperative-based and multi-faceted model
of how politics is conducted at the international level was shown to be needed by
the rise to prominence of military dwarfs such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq in the global
arena. In the ‘real’ world of international relations the ‘Carter Doctrine’, announced
in 1980, made it plain that questions relating to the economic resources of distant
states would enter into the calculations of the US national interest by stating that
military action to secure oil imports and interests was a possibility.
The rise to high politics of oil pricing prompted greater scrutiny of the
importance of threats to the supply of key economic resources to states. The 1970s
also saw the rise in concerns that global overpopulation could drain the world’s
resources (see Chapter 4) and greater recognition that resources could be threatened
by environmental degradation as well as through political action. It was not until the
1990s, however, when the agenda of international politics was allowed to broaden,
that environmental degradation as a potential state security threat began to take
prominence in academia and mould the thinking of foreign policy-makers. Economic
statecraft had been revived as an instrument of foreign policy by the oil crises but,
interestingly, it was not until the strategic constraints of the Cold War had been lifted
that a full manifestation of the Carter Doctrine was put into practice with the US-led
action against Iraq in the Gulf War. A Just War and long-awaited display of collective
security it may have been, but few would dispute that securing oil supplies was a key
motivation for the allied forces’ action.
Whether one takes a positive (moral) or cynical (wealth maximization) view of
the allied action, the Gulf War represented a use of military might to preserve stability
rather than to counter a direct military threat (apart from the perspective of the Gulf
States). In this light a strand of IR enquiry emerged in the New World Order era
to consider if threats to stability due to environmental degradation were possible and
hence something that should be of concern to Realist-minded foreign policy-makers.
American academic Homer-Dixon has been at the forefront of this area of study,
leading teams of researchers throughout the 1990s in exploring the possibility of
causal links between environmentally induced resource depletion and military
conflict. His extensive research leads him to claim that links can be shown to exist.
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