Us and Oil

A conversation with Neta Crawford on our addiction to oil consumption.

With this interview, we continue our “war issue.” We spoke to Neta Crawford about what she calls the “deep cycle” of interconnected dependency between U.S. oil consumption, economic growth, foreign interference, and climate change. Neta Crawford co-founded the Costs of War Project in 2010 at Brown and has published several books, including Accountability for Killing and The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, among others.

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frank | Do you mind starting by introducing yourself and your background and sort of how you got to this work?

Neta | I’m Neta Crawford. I am a professor of international relations at St Andrews University. I recently stopped working at Oxford so I could go further north into the dark. <laughs> I have a background in national security — I have been doing research for the past 40 years on these topics.

How did you come to the climate piece of work, the subject of your book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War.

Well, I was teaching a course with three other people and the point was to look at climate change and climate science from A to Z. My role in the class was to do the international relations theory piece, to talk about climate change negotiations, the sort of global inequality and so on.

One lecture, I needed to find a piece of information about how much US military emissions factor into the overall emissions picture. I couldn’t find the information I wanted, so I started to try to figure out why I couldn’t find that data. It turns out the US had, at the Kyoto Protocol urged other states to not include most military emissions reporting, and that it isn’t, to this day, part of the accounting.

So I figured I had to calculate it myself — I started to calculate the basic emissions from operations and installations. I began to think about the whole problem from a historical perspective, I wanted to understand how that developed and how it is that the United States military became the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter as an institution.

I remember finding that surprising, sort of the level to which the military was taking climate change seriously as a threat – even while people continue to debate. I’m curious to hear you say more about how the military’s perspective has evolved over time?

In the early 1990s, it became very clear to the military that with especially the ice melting at the poles, this would change the salinity of the water in the world, which would affect sonar. Meaning, they couldn’t do underwater detection with the same sort of reliability and finesse, the degree of certainty that you’d want to, let’s say, find an enemy sub. That is an example of how they saw it as a technical problem – and there are other versions of that.

And, as you mentioned, they started working on innovations that would make them more resilient in the face of climate change–changing their grid, hardening the grid, having solar and other alternative ways to generate energy, smart batteries, so that they would be less dependent on fossil fuels.

As they figure out ways to harden themselves, have they had a larger strategy shift? You describe what you call a “deep cycle” that keeps us entrenched from a military POV in fossil fuels?

In the late 19th century, as we moved away from arms and legs and horses and cows pulling things, the need—the perceived need—to have fuel and reliable sources, cheap sources of it, grew. So then you want access, not just here in the US to that fuel, but abroad.

The United States began to develop treaty relations or acquire land that would help them get access to cheap fossil fuels.

For instance, they got a fuel depot in what is now Pearl Harbor, and that’s sort of the first military facility in Hawaii. And now Hawaii is one of the most militarized state in the United States, with a high percentage of its land devoted towards the military.

During and after World War I and World War II, the US sought to secure oil they could acquire inexpensively from the Middle East and Persian Gulf. The strategy was to establish military bases in the region. Initially, the British controlled these bases, but the United States took them over in the late 1960s to protect the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, influence regional stability, and prevent Soviet takeover of these resources.

Beyond the Middle East, the U.S. established bases worldwide. Throughout the Cold War, the United States operated approximately 2,000 overseas military bases. This vast network increased U.S. dependency on fuel, creating a self-reinforcing cycle: maintaining such a large military required protecting fuel supplies, which in turn demanded even more military resources to secure.

And then when you’re protecting your base and everything that is around it, you’re not necessarily looking to off-ramps to that dependency because you think you can control it. The cycle is essentially the felt need for having access leads to having the bases, then the having of the bases means you need to have more access to fuel. You don’t rethink any of this, you just keep that stuff. It becomes a legacy.

Besides an environmental or even a moral argument, is there a need argument? Are we still in a world where we need that level of access to oil? Does it come down to relinquishing perceived power…

A lot of this is about the price that you’ll pay for the oil. The United States has, for decades, wanted to use up the other countries’ oil before they use up their own. The world’s largest petroleum producer and owner of oil assets, is the US, but it gets a lot from other countries.

So the other thing is, we have an enormous Petroleum Reserve, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, that could enable the United States to function for some time in a war-making capacity with that fuel.

So it’s a belt and suspenders approach. You have access to the fuel you’re buying via these companies that are based in Saudi Arabia or Iraq. And you have your own fuel. And then you’ve got this reserve, which you’re buying when the price is low, and filling up the tank – which we basically never use unless the US needs to drop the price in the US.

Normally, we think of basing and alliances as being the consequence of other things. For instance, we want to protect democracy, or we want to support our friends—we only need access to something else. But it’s often, a big part of it is fuel itself.

What arguments then do you think might be effective to have the US or US citizens rethink that position?

I mean, first of all, we don’t need as much oil. The transition to alternative energy production, which is going gangbusters, means that there’s less demand for fossil fuel. And if there’s less demand for fossil fuel, we don’t have to protect those assets, and there’s plenty here.

I think a transition is good in terms of foreign policy, in the sense that you’re not defending or supporting regimes that are not democratic just because they have oil. And if you make a transition to alternative fuels, you are also not part of the problem of climate change. And here’s the thing—the military also thinks climate change is affecting their operations and their installations and causing great expense and stress to their troops. And if they’re concerned about climate change being a threat multiplier, then they also want to reduce global warming so that it doesn’t have these effects on political stability that they are so afraid of.

Is this idea of climate as a threat multiplier in any way encouraging or changing the tide in DC on broader action towards climate change?

No, I think that the threat multiplier language helps to keep military budgets high. Military budgets are astronomical, right? The United States spends about a trillion dollars annually now on the Department of Defense. The world’s total military budget is 2.7 trillion. The United States is essentially 40% of all world military spending. If you combine the military budgets of China and Russia, the United States is twice their spending.

You need to have rationales for that spending. And one rationale, because you’re taking a lot of resources, is defense of the homeland. Well, the United States has the defense of the homeland down. We’re behind two large moats, and it’s very hard to attack the United States.

The United States also has military forces to influence things abroad. But if you can influence things with other tools, for instance, diplomacy or economics, and don’t use the military as much, that’s probably to everyone’s benefit.

The most important thing that military forces are there to do is defend yourself. If you’ve got that mission accomplished, then you have to think about, what else is it doing? And are those things necessary? Is it necessary to have tens of thousands of troops in the Persian Gulf to defend oil that you are interested less and less in burning, right? And then the other things the United States military is doing is helping to defend Taiwan and Japan, right? These are commitments that the United States has made. And then you say to yourself, well, okay, what’s the likelihood of China invading Taiwan? Is our strategy now making that more or less likely?

The way the United States is planning to defend Taiwan from China, if they should threaten or actually make moves to be aggressive, is deep strikes into Chinese territory, going after the military assets of China before they get to Taiwan. Well, the Chinese perceive that capacity—the submarines off their coast and the aircraft carriers patrolling and the aircraft themselves flying—as aggressive. And so they increase their military spending and their rhetoric.

Do we need this sort of perpetual stalemate?

If the US readjusted its military strategy to be more in with this thinking, i.e. shut down bases, stop taking measures that might be seen as escalatory and aggressive with places like China, do you think that other countries would follow suit? I think to the layman, there’s this perception that the US needs to be in all these places, because if they don’t, Russia and China will fill the void. What do you make of that?

It’s really complicated, and every situation is unique. For instance, we could talk for hours about US strategy in Africa and Asia and Latin America and whether or not these conflicts can be de-escalated and there can be a turnaround. That’s what the State Department needs the funding to do.

The same with allies. No, it’s not simple, but what we have to get, I think, is that this is an action-reaction dynamic, right?

When China does something aggressive and, from our perspective, provocative, the reaction is, well, we’ve got to respond to that with a presence and more spending and aggressive rhetoric.

Biden was talking for a long time about how the Chinese are stealing America’s intellectual property. Well, how do you respond to certain threats like that? Do you respond to threats like that with a robust military? Or do you respond to it in another way? How else can you protect your intellectual property?

There’s a concern that the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which is its funding of infrastructure in other parts of Asia, and in Africa, is an encroachment on US interests. Well, China has one overseas military base—one. The United States has about 700 right now. Could we react to that by saying, well we don’t want you to have that much influence, so we are going to respond to that by helping, i.e. giving loans. And it would actually be cheaper.

I think what I’m calling for is a sort of a foreign policy that doesn’t assume that the tool that you usually reach for first, aggressive responses and a buildup of military forces, is necessarily right. I’m not saying I have a one-size-fits-all solution.

Right now, if you look at US military spending, it goes up almost no matter what the US military is doing. It hardly goes down. But notice how the US military has retracted. It left Iraq and Syria. It left Afghanistan, right. Yet military spending goes up. Other countries, their military spending goes up and down based on the missions that they’re engaged in.

What are we spending it on?

Well, if you look at the military budget, there are a lot of interesting facts you’ll find. For one, personnel is a large part of the cost. Healthcare is an important part of the cost. Having a military of about a million people, and then the Department of Defense, and then paying for private contractors is a big portion of it. And that’s—unless you decrease the size of the military– that’s going to be fairly constant.

And then there’s always buying the equipment, which, you know, rolls out over several years—so procurement. And then military exercises. It’s a huge operation which has certain fixed costs, and some of those costs you see in the overseas military bases, right? So the US sometimes rents bases and has lease agreements. Some of those are actually quite minimal in terms of cost. For instance, the United States rents bases in Hawaii for $1 a year. How interesting, right? $1 a year per base.

Because it brings Hawaii industry?

No, this was a legacy of World War II. Large portions of Hawaii were essentially taken over for military purpose during the war, because it was deemed a military necessity to have the land and the ports.

It’s interesting to me, it feels like one of the only thing that motivates action is fear. Whether that is on military action, border enforcement, etc., the underlying motive is fear. I find it interesting that climate change doesn’t seem to have that same reaction. Do you have thoughts on why that is.

Humans tend to think really short-term. I mean, that’s natural. So there are a few generals recently who said “war with China is coming” and it’s coming next year. That’s the immediate. Whereas the long-term threats, you don’t even necessarily understand when they’re coming, if they’re coming, what the risk is.

But it’s very perceptive of you to focus on the word fear, because the Defense Department, or the War Department, whatever they want to call it these days, is focused on threats. The rhetoric of all these things is: “the sky is falling, the enemy is coming, you should be afraid, and we’re going to protect you.” Sort of a kindergarten fairy tale kind of language.

There are things to be afraid of, but we also have to understand how what is called a “security dilemma dynamic” can unfold. That simply means that when we defend ourselves against things that we find threatening or frightening, that may actually increase the sense of fear on the other side. And they in turn, up their level of mobilization or their military forces. And now we’re more afraid. They are afraid – we’re afraid.

This escalatory spiral, this security dilemma dynamic, can cause us to feel like conflict is inevitable and there’s only one way to respond, military force. That’s why I’m suggesting that with fresh eyes, we say to ourselves, “Well, what are the other options here?”