Michael Klare

Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts, USA), defense correspondent of The Nation magazine and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Klare serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association. He is a regular contributor to many publications including The Nation, TomDispatch and Mother Jones, and is a frequent columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. He also was the narrator of the movie Blood and Oil, which was produced by the Media Education Foundation.

He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Analysis of US threats against Iraq

In November 2005, Klare alleged that a major factor motivating the George W. Bush administration to attack Iraq was its desire to distract attention from domestic political difficulties and to increase popularity for the President. US popular support for Bush increased by about 10% during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and only dropped back to its previous level several months later.^[1]

Extreme energy

Klare originated the concept of extreme energy. Extreme energy is a range of techniques for the production of energy from unconventional resources which share characteristics of being environmentally damaging or risky. Examples include exploitation of oil sands and shale oil, deepwater drilling, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal mining, petroleum exploration in the Arctic, and natural gas hydrates.^[2][3]

Oil as an instrument of national policy

The movie Blood and Oil, which came out before the end of the Bush Administration, explains Klare's view on oil as an instrument of national policy. Using sources including statements from official government sources and statements by media commentators, Klare pushes for alternative energy and warns that energy will be hard to get in the next century. The website for the movie describes the movie as follows:

The notion that oil motivates America's military engagements in the Middle East has long been dismissed as nonsense or mere conspiracy theory. Blood and Oil, a new documentary based on the critically-acclaimed work of Nation magazine defense correspondent Michael T. Klare, challenges this conventional wisdom to correct the historical record. The film unearths declassified documents and highlights forgotten passages in prominent presidential doctrines to show how concerns about oil have been at the core of American foreign policy for more than 60 years – rendering our contemporary energy and military policies virtually indistinguishable. In the end, Blood and Oil calls for a radical re-thinking of US energy policy, warning that unless we change direction, we stand to be drawn into one oil war after another as the global hunt for diminishing world petroleum supplies accelerates.^[4]

The future of oil

In a number of articles, Klare has commented on the future of oil. In an article published on March 13, 2012, he discussed "the principal cause of higher oil prices",^[5] concluding that "a fundamental shift in the structure of the oil industry" has occurred because of "the disappearance of relatively accessible and inexpensive petroleum", and that countries will have to grasp for the harder oil in the future. In another article, he continues this thesis and suggests that sanctions on Iran make not only Iranians suffer, but also those that buy oil from Iran.^[6] That same month, Klare noted the sensitive spots of conflict in the "Geo-energy era". They include the Strait of Hormuz, the East and South China Seas, the Caspian Sea basin, and the Arctic polar region.^[7] In another article in 2011, Klare expanded his thesis to something more radical. He noted that America and oil were falling together.^[8]

Bibliography

• War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams (New York: Knopf, 1972). (Translations in Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish.)
• Supplying Repression (New York: Field Foundation, 1978). (2nd ed., with Cynthia Arnson, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C., 1981.)
• Beyond the 'Vietnam Syndrome': U.S. Interventionism in the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).
• American Arms Supermarket (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
• Low-Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Anti-terrorism in the Eighties, co-editor and contributor (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
• Peace and World Security Studies: A Curriculum Guide, 6th ed., editor and contributor (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994). (5th ed., co-editor and contributor, 1991).
• Lethal Commerce: The Global Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons, co-editor and contributor (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1995).
• Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America's Search for a New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995).
• A Scourge of Guns: The Diffusion of Small Arms and Light Weapons in Latin America, with David Andersen (Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists, 1996).
• World Security: Challenges for a New Century, 3rd ed., co-editor and contributor (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). (1st ed., co-editor and contributor, 1991; 2nd ed., co-editor and contributor, 1994.)
• Light Weapons and Civil Conflict, co-editor and contributor (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
• Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Owl Books, reprint edition 2002).
• Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004; paperback, Owl Books, 2005).
• (with Peter Kornbluh) Low Intensity Warfare: How the USA Fights Wars Without Declaring Them (Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1989, ISBN 0-413-61590-1).
• Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Henry Holt & Company, Incorporated, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8050-8064-3).
• The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, Metropolitan Books; First Edition (March 13, 2012), hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 0805091262 ISBN 978-0805091267 ^[9]

Published articles

• Shopaholic China: chinadialogue July 2, 2010
• Russia and Georgia: All About Oil
• Michael Klare on the Carter Doctrine
• New Geopolitics
• "Michael Klare interviewed by Creel Commission" February 21, 2006. also at Jackalope Recordings
• "A Scourge of Small Arms," from Scientific American, June 2000 (with Jeffrey Boutwell).
• "New Korean War Peace Accord Spells Disaster for Pentagon War Planners," from Pacific News Service, June 22, 2000.
• "Quest for Oil Drives Aid to Colombia," from Alternet, May 4, 2000.
• Archive of Michael Klare's articles in The Nation (1999–2006).
• "New James Bond Thriller Foreshadows Real Dangers in Caucasus," from Pacific News Service, November 24, 1999.
• Klare, Michael (January 1999). "The Kalashnikov age". "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". 55 (1): 18–22. doi:10.2968/055001009. Retrieved 2009-08-05.  External link in |journal= (help)
• "Small Arms and Light Weapons: Controlling the Real Instruments of War," from Arms Control Today, August/September 1998 (with Jeffrey Boutwell).
• Klare, Michael (January–February 1997). "East Asia's militaries muscle up". "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc. 53 (1): 56–61. ISSN 0096-3402. Retrieved 2009-08-05.  External link in |journal= (help)
• "Rogue States and ‘Peer Competitors' - A New Military Strategy for Washington?" from Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1997.

Notes

External links

• PAWSS biography of Michael Klare
• Conversation with Klare
• Klare's articles published in Whole Terrain
• Five Colleges Program in Peace and World Security Studies
• Pulse Berlin / Stone Gossard
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Klare on Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, April 30, 1995.