ABSTRACT
As has been seen in the first three chapters, the two major geopolitical shifts that affected the world in the 1970s and then at the end of the 1980s served to bring the environment into widened security purview due to heightened fears over resource depletion, and then allow the opportunities to deal with such concerns to eventually emerge from the shadow of superpower rivalry. For many, a link between resource depletion and military power politics calculations began to become apparent in the economic downturn of the 1970s and then became firmly established after the conclusion of the Cold War. The economic downturn that accompanied the oil crises of the 1970s shook international
relations practically and academically. The US and global economies thrived under the Bretton Woods monetary system centred on Washington through the 1950s and 1960s, but it all came unstuck in the 1970s, amidst the global economic recession of 1971-4. The sudden rise in oil prices, instigated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (see Box 4.1) taking advantage of having secured political control of this crucial commodity from multinational corporations (MNCs), allied to the spiralling costs of the Vietnam War, led to the US budget deficit (amount of debt acquired through borrowing) getting so large that bondholders and other governments began to lose faith in the dollar holding its value in relation to gold. Importantly, the revival of European economies and emergence of Japan as a major player in the international economymeant that the US’s hegemonywas not what it had been; other currencies were emerging to rival the US dollar, leaving it ill-equipped to be a world currency any more. In light of these changes 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 Kenneth Waltz (1979), revamped the old paradigm to accommodate non-military components of power into its framework of analysis based on competitive state-state relations. At the same time, a new breed of Liberal thinkers, Pluralists such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye (1977), felt vindicated that a more cooperative-based and multifaceted model of how politics is conducted at the international level was shown to be needed by the rise to prominence of military dwarfs but resource-rich countries, such as the OPEC countries, in the global arena. In the ‘real’ world of international relations, the ‘Carter doctrine’, announced by the US President in 1980, made it plain that
questions relating to the economic resources of distant states would enter into the calculations of the American national interest, by stating that military action to secure oil imports and other economic interests was a possibility:
An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
