Rethinking Energy Statecraft: United States Foreign Policy and the Changing Geopolitics of Energy
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12461 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
Rethinking Energy Statecraft: United States
Foreign Policy and the Changing Geopolitics of
Energy
Morgan Bazilian
Columbia University and University of Cambridge
Benjamin Sovacool
University of Sussex and Aarhus University
Todd Moss
Center for Global Development and Rice University
Abstract
The United States Administration has an opportunity to foster a new energy statecraft based on the realities of a dynamic
and rapidly-changing global energy marketplace. The geopolitical considerations of this energy transition are not well-
explored. Additionally, the recent renaissance of oil and gas in the US has reinforced the alluring notion that energy indepen-
dence and national energy security are the same thing. But the global nature of energy markets expose this notion as utterly
misleading. A re-envisaged energy statecraft would utilize a variety of US foreign policy and multilateral tools to reform the
international energy sector, protect the global energy marketplace, and spur investments in new generation and innovation.
These steps require building an integrated approach to the multiple energy-security challenges.
Energy and security
Energy may be central to United States’foreign policy, but
we are living in the past. The new administration thus has
an opportunity to foster a new energy statecraft based on
the realities of a dynamic and rapidly-changing global
energy marketplace.
The dominant energy security policy of the United States
has long been formalized by the Carter Doctrine, which sta-
ted that any effort by a hostile power to block the flow of
oil from the Persian Gulf would be viewed as an assault on
the vital interests of the United States, and would be
repelled by ‘any means necessary, including military force’.
Officials continue to interpret energy statecraft largely
through this oil lens, sometimes accompanied by the ebb
and flow in popularity of so-called energy independence.
However, the massive transitions now apparent in the global
energy sector, and the technological revolution underway in
nearly all aspects of modern energy, demand an evolution
in the US foreign policy approach (Bordoff, 2016; Pascual
and Elkind, 2010).
The US Department of State acknowledges that, ‘energy is
at the nexus of national security, economic prosperity, and
the environment’, and defines its role as managing ‘the
geopolitics of today’s energy economy through reinvigo-
rated energy diplomacy with major producers and
consumers of energy’(Department of State, 2017). The
Department added a Bureau of Energy Resources (S/ENR) in
2011, and it has, in the past few years, begun moving
beyond a focus solely on issues related to the flow of global
or regional commodities. The US government has turned to
the intricacies of electricity, including issues related to grow-
ing regional interconnection, and more focus on distributed
technologies, diverse generation portfolios, and local auton-
omy. But this does not yet go far enough.
Multiple energy transitions
The notion of an ‘energy transition’remains an inchoate
concept. Classically understood to encompass shifts in the
national supply of energy or the discovery of new energy
resources, energy transitions are now also conceptualized to
include transformations in the markets that deliver energy,
in addition to conversions in end-use devices such as air
conditioners, light bulbs, or engines, or even the ‘systems of
systems’that delivery energy services (Grubler et al., 2016;
Sovacool 2016). In its recent formulation, it refers to a con-
fluence of issues from rapid cost declines in renewable
energy systems like wind and solar, to the US shale ‘revolu-
tion’, to IT advances in smart grids, to innovative new busi-
ness and contract models (Grubler, 2012; Smil, 2016). A
recent article cited three dominant themes of the transition
©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2017) 8:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12461
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 3 . September 2017
422
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