The Strategic Importance of Water

The next war in the Middle East will be over water, not politics." --Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 1991 Geographical variables and their importance to international relations and political military affairs are easily ignored, even though two events of the 1970s drew the attention of policymakers to the issue of resource availability with an urgency unknown in peacetime.The first was the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74; the second was the 1978 invasion of Zaire's Shaba province by Angola-based guerrillas.The former quadrupled petroleum prices and reminded producers and consumers alike that the world economy depended on the highly concentrated deposits of this increasingly scarce fossil fuel.In the latter case, even the brief curtailment of cobalt shipments from Zaire caused prices to escalate from $6 to over $50 per pound on the spot market.Disruption of the cobalt market forced a wide-scale reevaluation of the concept of strategic resources.In the United States, the review included non-fuel minerals essential to US industry, such as chrome, manganese, and platinum group metals, virtually 100 percent of which are imported.Analysts were reminded that, as with petroleum, world reserves of these minerals were not evenly distributed but were largely concentrated in politically unstable regions.Policymakers, in turn, acknowledged that the destabilizing imbalance of natural resource supply and demand can have profound consequences for US security interests.The vice president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, captured the current wisdom on natural resource issues when he said, "Many of the wars of this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be about water."[1]When President Jimmy Carter drew his line in the sand with the Carter Doctrine, he was simply formalizing what everyone knew: Middle Eastern oil was vital to the national security of the United States and its Western allies.Few would argue that petroleum was not a major underlying cause of the Gulf War, and currently Iran is putting pressure on Saudi Arabia to reduce its oil production in order to drive up world oil prices and help Iran pay for its $10 billion arms buildup.The growing nuclear program of Iran, Israel's nuclear weapons program, and the interests of other Middle East states in nuclear weapons continue to show the potential for oil to lead the world to further conflict.However, in terms of its relative scarcity and the ability of economics and technology to mitigate the imbalance of its supply and demand, water poses different and potentially more difficult problems for strategists.Efforts to manipulate the global supply of petroleum have been a leading phenomenon of the final decades of the 20th century.Control of the sources of fresh water could be equally significant in the opening decades of the next.The insufficiency of fresh water has in the past led to violent conflict, and is currently the source of international tensions, but one should not simply assume that population growth will inevitably lead to war over water.Technology, pricing, conservation, trade, and industrial and agricultural policy changes may mitigate water scarcity and alter the prescription for conflict.Research on environmental security issues generally accepts the multiple causes of conflict, but fresh water is undeniably an important variable.Given assumed population growth, changes in climatic conditions, and the imbalance of water resource supply and demand, it will continue as a source of tensions; it could become the determinant variable in future international conflict.This article examines the strategically important environmental security issue of water resource scarcity, imbalances in fresh water supply and demand, methods of mitigating water scarcity, conditions that are likely to signal when water resources may lead to conflict, and policy options that might help us to change that equation. Water SupplyPetroleum is but the currently most popular energy alternative in a relatively crude stage of mankind's energy technology development.It remains cheap, widely available, and easily transported.Even if conventional oil reserves