The U.S. military and the evolving challenges in the Middle East

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2002 by Anthony H. Cordesman

The U.S. armed forces have long faced challenges in the Middle East, and they have generally done so with considerable success. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 did not create a radically new set of problems in the Middle East for services that had already experienced attacks on the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, punished terrorism by attacks on Libya, fought over a decade of asymmetric warfare with Iraq, and suffered from terrorist bombings at the National Guard Training Center and the al-Khobar barracks in Saudi Arabia and on the USS Cole (DDG 67) in Yemen. Neither 11 September nor the war in Afghanistan has made fundamental changes in U.S. interests in the Middle East or changed the basic strategic rationale behind the American military presence in the Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean. If anything, what is now called the "war on terrorism" exposed the depth of the challenges that have been evolving for many years, as well as the risks the United States will f ace if it does not come to grips with the security problems of the Middle East.

Terrorism and asymmetric warfare are clearly part of that challenge, but only part. We still confront the problems of protecting a key source of the world's energy supplies, supporting Arab allies and Israel, securing sea lines of communication, and dealing with weapons proliferation. We still face the risks of major regional contingencies and of war with Iraq, and possibly Iran. Terrorism and asymmetric warfare simply add new dimensions.

ENERGY EXPORTS AND LINES OF COMMUNICATION

The Middle East may represent a significant part of the global terrorist threat to the United States, as well as of the threat posed by asymmetric warfare, but we need to remember what our key strategic priorities are. The United States is ever more dependent on a globalized economy, and the global economy is becoming steadily more dependent on Middle Eastern energy exports.

We tend to take this dependence so thoroughly for granted that we sometimes fail to consider how important it is and how much it is estimated to grow in the future. There also is a tendency to view the issue in terms of American import dependence, our normal peacetime reliance on given countries for imports, and dependence on direct imports. These are all false approaches to the problem. We are steadily more dependent on global imports; therefore, what affects the global economy affects us.

Specifically, our level of direct imports is no measure of our strategic dependence. We compete for oil on a world market. Any shortage or price rise in a crisis forces us to compete for imports on the same basis as every other nation. Focusing on direct imports of oil ignores the fact that the United States has shifted its manufactured imports to include energy-dependent goods, particularly from Asia. These, in turn, are produced by economies that are critically dependent on oil obtained from the Middle East. Estimates of import dependence that include only direct imports of crude and refined products understate our true net dependence on oil imports to the point of analytical absurdity.

The New Level of Strategic Dependence on Energy Exports

To put this in perspective, the Gulf region alone has two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves. The U.S. government estimates that Saudi Arabia sits atop at least 262 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, 25.4 percent of the world supply. This compares with 11 percent for Iraq, 9.6 percent for the United Arab Emirates, 9.2 percent for Kuwait, 8.6 percent for Iran, 13 percent for the rest of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and 23.2 percent for all of the rest of the world.

These reserves make the Persian Gulf the one region in the Middle East that is a truly vital American strategic interest, although the United States does have major strategic interests in friends like Israel and Egypt. The sheer scale of Gulf oil reserves explains why the Department of Energy estimates that the region's oil exports will have to rise by 125 percent between 2000 and 2020 to meet the world's need for energy. The department also estimates that Gulf producers will account for more than 45 percent of worldwide trade by 2002--reaching this percentage for the first time since the early 1980s. The Gulf share of worldwide petroleum exports is projected to increase gradually after 2002 to almost 60 percent by 2020. The impact on key countries is illustrated by the fact that the Department of Energy estimates that Saudi oil production capacity must rise from 14.5 percent of all world export capacity in 2000 to 19.2 percent of that capacity by 2020.

These figures do not take account of the facts that the Middle East also has roughly 40 percent of all the world's gas reserves, some 35 percent of which are in the Gulf, and that similar increases must take place in gas exports. They do not account for world demographic trends that ensure that total Middle Eastern exports must also rise. They do not show that most importers have few or no strategic reserves and are increasingly dependent on a constant and predictable flow of oil and gas. Finally, they cannot take account of the fact that most of the growth in petroleum exports will go to nations that can be reached only by tanker and not by pipeline.