Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

First, the material you seem to agree with is the source article for Ms. Hockmuth's post, not the post itself: Idean Salehyan, "The New Myth About Climate Change", Foreign Policy, August 2007. Ms. Hockmuth simply adds a defense-related preamble and then quotes extensively from Mr. Salehyan's article for the remainder of the post.

Second, both Ms. Hockmuth and Mr. Salehyan directly reference (though without naming names) the CNA report from earlier in 2007. CNA was not the first, and won't be the last, organization to issue a report on the impacts of climate change: the IPCC has been at it over four complete research and evaluation cycles since 1990. Mr. Salehyan misinterprets the point of such reports, suggesting that defense and conflict are the primary issues, and misses the concept of human action in the process of our response to climate change. His argument conflates these two--while he acknowledges that good government can overcome such challenges, he also decries the perceived disavowal of responsibility in poorly-governed states. His argument is asymmetric in its essential thesis.

Third, whether the CNA report was "unanalytic" doesn't matter, as long as it addressed the fundamental issue at hand: climate change is yet another complicating factor in the treatment of national and international security in a world where natural resources are increasingly sought, stressed, and strained to the point of potential conflict. Water and food are seemingly a common right, until they go missing. Tell me you wouldn't fight your neighbor over the only freshwater source within a week's journey if it meant being able to grow the food and livestock to feed yourself and your family. Not all of the conflicts at issue are like that, but it's been happening in the Gap for a long time, and it still remains a neglected issue. Climate change will only make these conflicts more prevalent and visible.

National and international security is simply one aspect of our human response to climate change. Mr. Salehyan rightly connects the two, through the basic considerations of personal survival, but neglects to indicate the operation of individuals in society, with all of its ethnic and national divisions. Conflict at the level of international or civil war is certainly avoidable, especially with the involvement of rational actors as a party or external influence. However, not all conflict is avoidable. China and the rest of Southeast Asia conflict, at various levels, over water and energy resources, and it's not necessarily because of the pressures of climate change. As western China dries out further, either through long-term climate change or a more intense but isolated drought event, greater friction between China and Kazakhstan over water resources on their common border will become evident.

Mr. Salehyan neglects the rational actors in his argument against his own perception of the so-called conventional wisdom. The actual conventional wisdom on climate change, for those paying attention to the news, is the relative ineffectuality of the Kyoto Protocol and its furtherance with the Bali Conference earlier this month. From Rio to Bali, no true and effectual progress on the human response to climate change has been made. We can't stop it--that's a foregone conclusion of the scientific studies. We can only make changes in an incremental fashion, and governments are limited in their own effectiveness: military solutions, infrastructure solutions, legislation and fines, etc. In a good government, alternatives to military solutions abound, and Mr. Salehyan would have done better to research and report on some of those, especially in the US and Europe. In a bad government, without the motive or budget support for anything but military solutions, war and genocide will remain the only option, whether climate change or a neighbor's actions has brought about a scarcity of resources. But it's not the irrational actor's opinions on which we rely for our conventional wisdom--it's the rational actors in the Old and New Core states that creats the rule sets and process the Gap actors, and in many cases it takes a third-party show of force to quiet a civil war or put down an international dispute.

The US must plan for such interventions, and it's not a luxury for us. The more the Gap stays in conflict, the more disparity with the Core those states will need to make up later. Our consideration of these possibilities is a necessity, and such reports are a single step in our responsible consideration of the threats and treatment of the options. If we fail to plan, we plan to fail, and Mr. Salehyan seems to have forgotten that in his criticism of the ways the Core must address issues in the Gap as well as why the Gap is "Nonintegrating" in the first place.

A more succinct summary would be: It isn't resource scarcity that causes conflict, it's how you deal with that scarcity that causes conflict.

Yes, Michael--thank you. Often I get carried away with the topics that are closest to my work.

And my argument was primarily that Mr. Salehyan misses that point.