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by the attack on China in 1937). Jansen (2000) writes
about the peculiarly self-inflicted nature of the entire
confrontation with the United States. Further, no con-
vincing arguments can be made for energy supply
concerns as a justification for Hitler's serial aggressions
against Czechoslovakia (1938, 1939), Poland (1939),
Western Europe (1939, 1940), and the USSR (1941) or
for his genocidal war against the Jews.
The same is true about the genesis of the Korean War,
the war in Vietnam (waged by the French until 1954, by
the United States thereafter), the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan (1979-1989), the U.S. war against the Tali-
ban, nearly all cross-border conflicts (Sino-Indian, Indo-
Pakistani, Eritrean-Ethiopian), and numerous post-1950
civil wars. And while it could be argued that Nigeria's
war with secessionist Biafra (1967-1970) and Sudan's
endless civil war had clear oil supply components, both
were undeniably precipitated by ethnic differences, and
the second began decades before any oil was discovered
in central Sudan.
On the other hand, there have been various indirect
foreign interventions in Middle Eastern countries (arms
sales, military training, covert actions) that aimed at sta-
bilizing or subverting governments in the oil-rich region.
Their clearest manifestations during the Cold War were
the sales or transfers of Soviet arms to Egypt, Syria, Lib-
ya, and Iraq, and U.S. arms sales to Iran (before 1979),
Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. During the 1980s
these actions also included Western support of Iraq dur-
ing its war with Iran (1980-1988). These interventions
culminated in two wars where energy resources were
widely seen as the real cause of the conflicts. By invading
Kuwait in August 1990, Iraq not only doubled crude oil
reserves under its control, raising them to about 20% of
the global total, but it also directly threatened the nearby
Saudi oil fields and hence the very survival of the monar-
chy that controls 25% of the world's oil reserves.
Yet even in this seemingly clear-cut case there were
other compelling reasons to roll back the Iraqi expansion
(Lesser 1991). Hussein's quest for nuclear and other
nonconventional weapons with which the country could
dominate and destabilize the entire region, implications
of this shift for the security of U.S. allies, and risks of an-
other Iraqi-Iranian or Arab-Israeli war (recall the Iraqi
missile attacks on Israel design to provoke such a con-
flict) mattered a great deal. And if the control of oil was
the sole, or at least the primary, objective of the 1991
Gulf War, why was the victorious army ordered to stop
its uncheckable progress as the routed Iraqi divisions
were fleeing north, and why it did not occupy at least
Iraq's southern oil fields? By 2005 nobody could deny
that if the U.S. objective were gaining access to Iraqi oil,
it would have been much cheaper (and casualty-free) to
give Saddam Hussein interest-free loans to boost Iraq's
production capacity rather than to occupy the country in
2003.
12.5 Energy and the Future
I recognize the value of exploratory forecasts to stimulate
critical thinking and as tools for formulating and criticiz-
ing new ideas. But most energy forecasts fall into a much
less exalted category of plain failures (Smil 2003). The
reasons for these failures are several. On the most general
level is a longstanding Western intellectual tradition that
favors a catastrophic view of the future. Fear of running
out of resources in general, and of energy in particular,
is a relatively recent addition to this genre. Its great nine-
teenth-century classic foresaw the exhaustion of Britain's
coal resources, leading to inevitable decline of the coun-
try's economic and political supremacy (Jevons 1865).
