Register

Peak Oil is You


Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)


Page added on May 31, 2013

Bookmark and Share

Blood for oil

Blood for oil thumbnail

There’s quite a bit of scholarship about oil and civil conflict, but the role oil plays in driving interstate war is a bit less understood. A clever paper by Fracesco Caselli of LSE, Massimo Morelli of Columbia University, and Dominic Rohner of the University of Lausanne attempts to measure this by looking at whether the geographic location of oil reserves effects the likelihood of conflict between neighboring states.

According to previous research cited in the paper, 86 percent of all full-blown international wars between 1945 and 1987 were between neighboring states, 72 percent of them involving disputes over territory. Nearly half of all changes in international borders between 1816 and 1996 involved some level of international conflict. So if competition over oil is really driving international conflict, one would expect wars to be more likely when the oil is closer to the border, and thus easier to capture — think of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, or the ongoing border conflict between Sudan and South Sudan.

Using the Correlates of War dataset, the authors pulled out 606 examples of conflicts between 1946 and 2008 where the two sides either shared a border or were seperated by less than 400 miles of water. In cases where the countries’ posessed oil, they used a georeferenced dataset to measure the proximity of oil fields to the border in question. Here’s what they found:

 

Quantitatively, the effect of geographic location is very sizeable. …As already noted, the average risk of conflict in our sample is 5.7 percent. This drops to 3.1 percent for country pairs in which neither country has oil. In contrast, when one country in the pair has oil, and this oil is right at the border (Distance = 0), the probability of conflict is almost 4 times as large: 11.6 percent. But this greater likelihood of conflict is very sensitive to distance. Indeed when the oil is located at the maximum theoretical value for our distance measure (Distance = 1) the likelihood of conflict is similar to the likelihood when neither country has oil.

The last two bars in the figure look at the case where both countries have oil. In the first instance, asymmetry is maximal: one country has oil right at the border (MinDist=0), the other at the maximum distance (MaxDist=1). The likelihood of conflict is almost three times as large as in the case where neither country has oil, or 8.6 percent. In the second instance, we look at a case of perfect symmetry: both countries have oil at a distance that is one half of the maximum distance (MinDist=MaxDist=0.5).

The likelihood of conflict is a much more modest 4.1 percent.

It’s a compelling finding, though from a non-specialist’s point of view, it also seems to show one of the limitations of relying on datasets for polticial analysis. It seems like a qualitative look at the facts surrounding some of the conflicts in question could pretty easily answer whether or not oil was a major motivating factor for the sides.

This is a very different take on the issue from Jeff Colgan’s recent book, which I wrote about earlier this month. Colgan argues that oil doesn’t cause interstate wars because states are fighting over the prize, but because of how the presence of oil effects a country’s domestic politics: Oil income lowers the potential costs of instigating armed conflict.

Caselli, Morelli, and Rohner address the possibility that oil-posessing states are more aggressive or militarily strong, but of course, this wouldn’t explain why the proximity of oil to a border seems to be a factor.

It would be interesting to expand this to wars between non-bordering countries. Anti-war groups often argue that U.S. interventions abroad are motivated by oil. But are assymetric conflicts like this actually any more common when there’s oil in the ground?

Foreign Policy



7 Comments on "Blood for oil"

  1. DC on Fri, 31st May 2013 1:50 am 

    Regardless what this FP group thinks, oil drives almost all US aggression. The US will sometimes destabilize one country, to affect many others. Think about GW2 for example. The US waged war on Iraq in order to prevent the spread of the sale of oil in Euros. The real target of that war-Europe. Europe has no oil to speak of, and is even nominally an ‘ally’, occupied by US troops no less. Yet they were very much a target of US aggression over oil. Wouldn’t show up in a statistical analysis-but its true all the same.

    Other examples are the US war being waged against Libya, Syria, Russia and Iran. All intended to destabilize and prevent a free(er) energy market outside US control from selling oil to whoever it wants in any currency it wants. Again, US support for muslim terrorists operating inside Russia proper, would not show up in this groups ‘analysis’ either-but there it is.

  2. Plantagenet on Fri, 31st May 2013 1:58 am 

    DC’s claim that the target of the US invasion of Iraq was Europe is silly.

    Iraq and Europe are different places. They are thousands of kilometers apart. DC really needs to learn a bit about geography so he can avoid making any more such silly claims.

  3. BillT on Fri, 31st May 2013 3:59 am 

    Plant, where does Europe’s oil come from now? Not the North Sea. Where does it’s natgas come from? Russia. What is oil purchased with? US Dollars. There is the web that attracts the Empire spider to the Middle East.

    There is some blood in every gallon of gas you pump if you are in the Western world. The Asians can go anywhere in the Middle East because they have not invaded any countries there. Therefore, they are going to end up with the oil contracts and not the West. The West just goes bankrupt trying to maintain their hold on the world.

  4. Arthur on Fri, 31st May 2013 9:53 am 

    If organized political groups carry out stunts like the JFK assasination, 9/11 or the Iraq invasion, there usually is a cluster of motives that outweigh the risks of the venture. Yes, Saddam openly challenged the NWO (US global supremacy) by indirectly targetting the dollar by showing a willingness to being paid in the brand new euro currency, backed by a solid economy that can deliver anything you could wish for. Saddam was useful for the Americans as long as he was willing to instrumentalize himself in his war against Iran (1980-1988), after that country had managed to escape the NWO under Khomeiny after a grassroots revolution (1979). Saddam btw was supported by US satrap rulers in SA and Kuwait, who feared a grass root uprising at home (can still happen, see Egypt). But shaking hands with Rumsfeld or let yourself being kissed by Blair (Khadaffi) or other representatives of the great Anglosphere oil empire, usually means a death warrant, executed on the very moment you are no longer useful.

    There were many reasons to invade, the pretext of which was 9/11 (WMDs). In descending importance:
    – PNAC – then there were ‘these jewish neocons’, as Carl Bernstein recently put it on national television. Jews basically see themselves as ‘the Chosen People’, destined to inherit and rule the world (read the Talmud, forget the Protocols). The British empire and USSR were previous attempts to realize that Talmudic dream and now the US is next. In 1999, after the demise of the USSR and the rise of the Unipolar Moment, the time was rife to go for the planetary gold. In the PNAC document there was talk of a ‘New Pearl Harbor’, necessary to mobilize American society, in a similar fashion as the original Pearl Harbor had done, a skillful executed plan which had resulted in the desired destruction and susequent incorporation of Europe into ‘the West’. The jewish neocon PNAC plotters were extremely lucky that they could rely on uncle bin Laden to deliver that New Pearl Harbor on their doorstep, free of charge, if you are foolish enough to believe that. The alternative hypothesis of course is that the PNAC plotters had a phone call with the Israeli prime minister, who commanded the resources of the Mossad. But this is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory and we are all glad we are not like that. The BBC documentary Panorama about the war party still illustrates the run up to the war in Iraq best, from a US friendly source.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cdhtxg8yE4
    – Peak Oil – Halliburton oilman Cheney knew very well that oil had the best days behind it. The invasion in Iraq promised to add an extra Saudi-Arabia to the long list of US oil satellites, leaving only Iran on the todo list.
    – Rise of the euro – The US rulers do not like the euro very much, as it is a potential competitor and hence threat for their dollar reserve currency free lunch. If Saddam had succeeded he would have set a bad example for the rest of the world.

  5. J-Gav on Fri, 31st May 2013 10:26 am 

    This sort of article serves little purpose in today’s geopolitics. Calculating proximity of reserves gives only part of the story as (sometimes distant) naval bases are equally important to police the sea lanes used to transport the stuff.

    Look at the Middle East pipeline situation (the West is already losing out to China in Central Asia).Why build the Nabucco pipeline if you’ve got nothing to put in it? They need Azebaijani production as a minimum plus some Kazakh production but that has disappointed so far … Next come the new largish gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean. How would all this, once exploited, get to Europe? Via Turkey. Who’s in the way? Syria! Starting to get the picture?

  6. DC on Fri, 31st May 2013 7:47 pm 

    Exactly J, as I said, the US often starts wars, sometimes far from where the oil actually is, sometimes not, but the goal is the same. Destabilize an area, or topple a gov’t in order to control its resources. Again, to use an example, the US and its proxies foment war in Syria-but Syria itself has very little oil, hardly with invading over right? Well, the war there is about oil as well, but you have look at a lot of other complex factors before one realizes that.

    This outfits job was to downplay the idea the US often wages war for oil, which of course, is totally accurate. But this bit of fluff is intended to convince the casual reader of only one thing, that the US doesn’t really start(that many) wars for oil.

  7. Arthur on Fri, 31st May 2013 10:12 pm 

    Again, there are many reasons to attack Syria, no it is not about non-existing Syrian oil and gas, but Iranian gas, for starters.

    After the US delivered a Shia restyled Iraq as a valuable ally to Iran, free of charge, the US had to mend a newly emerged geopolitical situation: a Shia corridor from Pars/Iran to the Mediteranian via Iraq and Syria. A pipeline was planned accordingly. Before the election the US media made fun of Romney, talking about ‘Syria is Iran’s Route to the Sea’, but he was correct:

    http://deepresource.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/romney-syria-is-irans-route-to-the-sea

    Another was the long-planned destruction of Syria as formulated in the 1999 ‘Clean Break’ strategy: destroy any Israeli neighbour with an attitude.

    And of course: Syria is an ally of Iran, the last line of defense of Russia.

    But it is all going wrong for the West, again. Because in 1999, fundamentalist Islam was a category in the books of Samuel Huntington at best, but not in the overrated dull brains of the Straussians in the ‘thinktanks’ in Washington. Just like they misunderstood the forces of unleashed Islam, in both the Sunni and Shia variety, they are now completely misreading the intentions of Turkey, a so-called ally of the West. Turkey could very well side with Russia and China, once the latter two have given Turkey the nod, that it can replace the US in the Middle-East. Erdogan wants to mimic Khomeiny and is ready to divide the Middle Eastern loot between Ankara and Teheran… Poor Saudi-Arabia.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *