Winter 2011 RESTRAINT UNDER CONSTRAINTS: 3 SCENARIOS OF OUR ENERGY-CHALLENGED FUTURE PREFACE In developing potential scenarios that could

plausibly arise over the next decade as we face tighter energy resource availability, a useful exercise may be found in the application of paradigms to their creation. Given the intellectual backand-forth over whether realism, liberalism or constructivism serve as better gauges of how geopolitical events unfold, I take the position that all three serve as equally useful constructs and interchangeably involve elements of each within. Furthermore, given the specifics of energy geopolitics, the fluid nature of paradigmatic behavior can be viewed equally well through scenarios that emphasize a global systemic view, a regional perspective, and a localized arena. To that end, the following three scenarios explore events to 2020 in three distinct ways. Scenario I, called AFTER-OIL, is a liberal scenario that envisions the effects of energy politics on the global system. In it, an act of Wahhabist extremism in Saudi Arabia crystallizes the intractability of the Middle East at a time when the global economy is at its most vulnerable. Unable to proceed with the instability of the region s oil hegemony, world leaders coalesce around the concept of an "After-Oil" moment of opportunity and forge an alternative energy revolution. Global capitalism undergoes a sea-change as states exact tighter regulation on multi-national corporations and businesses to force them to new standards. The initial phase of After-Oil s roll-out causes both market and public volatility, but represents the first step on a path to a more sustainable and less volatile global economic system. Scenario II, called ARCTIC HEAT, is a realist scenario that explores the dynamics of Great Powers in a changing regional setting. The receding of polar ice along the Arctic Circle ushers in new opportunities for the countries along its circumference, thanks to its newly exposed resources not the least of which include oil, gas and minerals. But the melting of the ice-cap brings conflict too, as a resource-hungry China confronts Russia and the US, both of whom have littoral Arctic interests. The slowly unspooling arc of governance change in the Middle East initiated by the Arab Spring affects the global oil supply, forcing China to find other sources. When its biggest energy investment in Brazil faces obstacles, China looks northwards to invest early and aggressively. But as China s presence in the Arctic grows, Russia, whose 17,500km border represents the single largest claim to the region, aims to push back its Asian neighbor. The US, constrained by an economic straitjacket, makes a deal with Russia in a joint effort to soft balance against China. A retaliatory act of cyber-espionage pits China against Russia and the US, which descends into a destructive act of cyberwarfare that threatens the viability of the world s largest economies. Scenario III, called AMERICAN DISUNION, is a constructivist scenario that imagines the ideological fault-lines that emerge when a disruptive event provokes the diverse and partisan polity of the US to demand change. Resource scarcity and its effects highlight and fuel the divisions throughout the country. The most critical schism that of Big Oil and the anti-government ideology it embodies via its corporate bosses versus the needs of the public and the governance 1

structure that elected representation has built within America faces a point of reckoning as energy demand collides with the need for employment in a fragile economy. The schism poses a basic dialectical problem for a financiallystrapped nation: the environment or jobs? Protest movements channel some of the frustration of the public, but even the approaches of the opposing constituencies elucidate difference; whereas one group applies a leaderless, bottom-up approach, its wealthier antagonist manifests a methodical, organized and top-down data-rich campaign. When the jobcreation discourse indirectly leads to an environmental disaster, the shockwaves caused by the disruption catalyze a further fraying of the seam in American society. Economic tumult, violent clashes and political jockeying all intensify. The blue versus red divisions of electoral partisanship evolve into a green versus brown divergence that becomes a proxy for the larger, longstanding ideological schism that has threatened the American polity for decades. Taken together, the three scenarios suggest a coming decade of instability, conflict and social evolution before a more cohesive, interdependent and stable world can emerge. Whether it can at all is entirely uncertain. DRIVERS OF OUR ENERGY-CHALLENGED FUTURE: Five key drivers can be identified across all three scenarios when considering the impact of energy on future events: 1. DEMAND OUTSTRIPS SUPPLY: Though experts argue both sides of the issue as to whether we are now facing a peak oil era, all industry professionals agree that growing demand for energy is already starting to outstrip supply. At the start of this decade, the burgeoning middle classes of BRIC states like India and China need rising amounts of fuel to power their new cars and upscale lifestyles. But as we near the end of the decade we will find ourselves in a vicious circle of needing more energy to counteract the effects of climate change that our fossil fuel use has created. The world will get hotter and drier in some areas, wetter and colder in others and population is only expected to increase. Shifts in energy expectations, and the inefficiencies that such transitions provoke, will subsequently drive up the total energy consumed. But how the supply (whether conventional or alternative) is distributed, by whom, and to whom, serve as the contingencies on which all anticipated events hinge over the next ten years. 2. CLIMATE CHANGE: States facing shaky economic outlooks are rendered more vulnerable and inclined to safeguard their national interests by hotter temperatures, more devastating storms, and the subsequent agricultural and environmental effects. In a global system defined by its interdependencies and the transnational shipping, trucking and air freight required, even small increases in commodity prices can plunge markets into chaos. Some exogenous climate change events, like floods or fires, will have immediate negative consequences; but the slower effect of warming temperatures presents a more complicated picture. In the case of melting Arctic ice, for example, it can buy time for states to develop alternative energy sources. But overall, a hotter world will require more fuel sources to cool down, get around, grow crops and slake thirst. Competition over resources can lead to conflict. 3. FOSSIL FUEL REGIONAL INSTABILITY: The Middle East, site of some of the largest oil reserves in the world has been a contested area since the beginning of recorded history. Sectarian violence between Muslims; jihadists and extremists 2

who use terrorism to punish Muslims for what they see as collusion with Western infidels or Zionists; and geopolitical power struggles between Arabs and Persians all contribute to perennial risk around the sourcing of oil and gas in the Persian Gulf states. However, the Middle East is not unique. Contentious politics are on the upswing as oil, gas, and coal are found in the Arctic, South America and in Central Asia, causing the largest and richest countries to wage economic battles to secure supplies for their growing populations. As we move towards the latter half of the decade, states with significant fossil fuel reserves, like Russia (which faces its own internal domestic upheavals and conflicts), will be at the center of conflicts among Great and smaller powers alike. 4. GLOBAL ECONOMIC REBALANCING: The wave of globalization that characterized the first decade of the millennium has been supplanted by the global contraction that ushered in the second decade. Over the next ten years, an economic rebalancing between the US, China, Europe and powerful economies like Russia, Brazil and others in Asia and elsewhere, will define the relations between countries, especially as they vie for energy resources to keep their economies afloat in a decade-long period of slow or no growth. Bi-lateral relationships will trump attempts at multilateralism, except in the case of order-altering black swan events, which force change. Multinational corporations, particularly those of Big Oil, will command more power than states in some cases, as they drive energy supply in the direction of greatest profits and not to the common interests of populations. The tyranny of unemployment will dictate decisions, leaving environmental and ethical concerns secondary (if considered at all). A Darwinian contest of the biggest and economically fittest will determine who prevails in a world of dwindling cheap energy. 5. NEW TECHNOLOGIES: Finding alternatives to fossil fuels has already driven the growth of new technologies at the start of this decade. While these technologies will not mature and be fully applicable by the end of the decade, the offshoot innovations, research and ideas they can generate may have more immediate importance. But new energy options are just one piece of the evolving technology puzzle that drives all three scenarios. The vast technological changes in warfare, yielding cheaper military solutions that can still paralyze states, will increase in direct correlation with Moore s Law. Expensive hot wars can be replaced by cyber-wars, whose economic devastation can match that of nuclear attacks, albeit without the same bloodshed and physical damage. Beyond the technological revolution in military affairs (RMA), as the next ten years sees continuing maturation and development of our global Information Age, people will become more proficient in using technology to improve their lives and solve problems. In the cases of social interaction, governance and communication, new technologies will also serve various interests as energy constraints place stress on populations.

Scenario I: AFTER-OIL [a neo-liberal scenario] As double-dip recessions and economic recalibration following the European sovereign debt and the US banking crises rocked markets throughout 2011, global stability took a turn for the worse shortly after Barack Obama was re-elected President in 2012. In December, Salafist jihadists launched a massive attack on the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (ARAMCO) headquarters in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. A precisely orchestrated operation led to the simultaneous bombing of the East-West crude oil and Dharan-Riyadh-Qasim pipelines, as well as the Ras Tanura industrial complex on the Gulf; in Dharan, the terrorists detonated explosives set around ARAMCO s main building on the day a series of meetings were held in the presence of King Abdullah. Ninety people were killed in the attack, with hundreds left seriously wounded, including King Abdullah, who was found in critical condition. Crude oil and gas supply were completely shut off for two weeks as the ruling family and ARAMCO workers struggled to bring the situation under control. The attack sent the world into a devastating financial panic. Saudi Arabian supply shut-off jacked up crude oil prices to a range of $300-350 a barrel in the first week of the event. Accordingly, agricultural commodities sent farm prices up by 50% in the US, but by 90% in China and India, where food and energy accounted for 50% of consumption costs. A global analysis of reserve supply released in the first few days of the event, indicating sufficient coverage for two weeks but only just to cover the extent of the Saudi shut-off served to calm markets somewhat in the second week, but currencies and equities continued to gyrate as the long-term costs of the attack were evaluated. The Dow dropped 400 points in the first day of trading after the event and began a downward spiral that bottomed out only once it had lost 20% of its value. North America and the EU, whose oil needs were not dependent on Saudi Arabian supply, did not experience manifestations of the panic on the streets at first, even though prices at the pump increased by 10% in the first week. The United States released several hundred million barrels from its strategic petroleum reserve (by that stage estimated to house a total of a billion barrels). Saudi-oil dependent Asia was another story. China, whose Saudi dependency spurred an energy resource buying binge begun in 2005 and still with billions in dollar reserves to spare, owned significant stakes in the world's oil equity by 2012; still, the crisis caused a commodity price spike that hit China's population hard, with rice prices tripling. To keep driving the economy, China pressured its energy and food partners in Central Asia, Africa and Latin America to ensure constant supply during the crisis at below-market prices (thanks to the deals China cut with them over the previous decade). While this helped to quash hungry and poor restive Turkic and Tibetan populations within its own borders, China's voracious needs had its partners whose own populations found themselves under economic threat from higher global commodity prices bristling. India and South Korea, also heavily dependent on Saudi crude and whose growing middle classes prized their air-conditioning and automobiles, watched as their equity indexes nosedived and petrol prices skyrocketed. Oil shortages caused violent riots in both countries through 2015 as their respective governments instituted usage restrictions.

An emergency OPEC meeting during the ARAMCO event widened the decade-long schism between member states in Latin America and Africa and Saudi Arabia's Gulf allies, when the latter demanded that the former increase supply immediately. Desperate to reap the benefits of high prices in light of their own economic troubles, aging infrastructure and inefficient extraction, the former resisted the pressure and threatened to break off from the group. The diversion in interests between the two camps never fully recovered, rendering OPEC a hobbled institution. Meanwhile, bloody protests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates heightened the confusion and added to the Wahhabist violence as Shia demonstrators, seeing an opportunity to further destabilize monarchic Sunni rule and bankrolled by an Iran seeing its chance at regional hegemony, clashed with royal supporters; the arc of Shia violence spread to Nigeria, where an Iranian-backed local Shia sect blew up a pipeline in the Niger Delta, adding to capacity constraints in global oil supply in the second week of the crisis. With OPEC in disarray and scrambling for a solution to this new development, the markets reeled. Commodity prices surged and China and Goldman Sachs began to buy remaining oil equity stakes and grain reserves. The uncertainty and instability of the Middle East led to dire warnings of prolonged macroeconomic effects to rising economies in Asia and Latin America, not the least of which included increased costs for the production of goods and services, inflation, unemployment, reduced demand for products other than oil, and lower capital investment. Monetary policies that had been tightened after the global economic crisis of 2008 were estimated to lessen the inflationary impact of the market turmoil, but the rise in global unemployment that began after the ARAMCO crisis deepened the pre-existing recession. For many countries, including the US and those in the EU, the collapse of stability in the Middle East and the ensuing crisis of confidence in already battered equity markets served as a catalytic turning point. Faced with imminent further decline in tax revenues, increases in budget deficits and interest rates and an inevitable shift in sectoral labor forces as high as 15%, a group of concerned nations led by the US and the EU called for an extraordinary emergency session combining G20 and International Energy Agency (IEA) members. To prepare for the meeting, the US assembled a panel of the world's largest oil and gas suppliers to determine reserve supply and consumption rate estimations based on their own varying assessment of conventional and unconventional supplies. The consensus among the panelists was that pricing pressures on conventional oil resources and global instability would worsen over the following decade. A separate meeting of the world's largest vehicle manufacturers (owing to the fact that 65% of non-transferable oil consumption is in transportation) was then called to present a status update on innovation and rolling stock mitigation. Armed with the panelists' information and inspired by the same inflection point of opportunity in disruptive crisis that led the US to use its immediate post-WWII "after victory" moment to steer peace and economic advantage, the US and its tar sands oil-rich partner Canada, in association with the UK and green-friendly Germany, entered the joint G20/IEA meeting with a draft of a wide-ranging conceptual proposal. Predicated on the logic that the interdependent global economy now faced the moment of reckoning when alternatives to dependence on diminishing non-renewable fossil fuel availability had to be sought now cooperatively or face permanent economic instability, the "After-Oil" proposal was 5

introduced in early 2013. Consisting of a 15-year phased mitigation program whereby available global petro-reserves would be pooled and rationed among all member countries while alternative fuel supplies are developed and plugged into national grids (thereby also reducing carbon emissions that were creating economically disastrous climate changes), After-Oil was a radical attempt at short-term sacrifice for long-term stability. The proposal demanded a host of measures be put in place, including supply security and enforcement; legal mandates to not only abide by After-Oil rules, but suffer restriction penalties; knowledge and technology sharing among all participants, and the creation of coordinated global communication programs to not only facilitate inter-state dialogue, but also to provide a cohesive rationale that all states would deliver to their citizens (who were being made to alter their lifestyles dramatically). After-Oil's two-track program split responsibilities among countries for the pooling/rationing/enforcement track and the displacement/innovation track. The latter not only required technologies offering significant fuel efficiency improvements via retrofits, which could improve the efficiency of existing equipment, and displacement technologies, which could replace existing, less efficient oil consuming ones; it also required immediate legal adaptation and state and private sector investment into alternative fuels. The US and Canada, then confronting the political and environmental complications of a domestic shale gas market bubble, impressed upon their fellow nations the urgency of turning away from geological sources. To procrastinate yet again would spell their doom, especially among oil-dependent and emerging states. The Americans knew that for themselves and for several other countries, selling this to their own constituencies was a political kamikaze run which given Obama s second term status was a risk worth taking. But they also knew that the alternative, procrastinating and hoping for the best, would ensure far worse within a decade. By setting up the combustible dynamics and diminishing supply of the Middle East (and the climate change that was wreaking economic damage globally) as the basis on which the world's economies had no choice but to act, they hoped that citizens would be compelled to accept the new rules of this altered world. Representatives of G20 member Saudi Arabia already frantic from the attack and the threat to their rule, and the awareness that After-Oil would plunge their country and allies into irrelevancy protested vociferously to the plan. However, US and EU representatives tried to reassure Saudi Arabia that After-Oil would require contingent-based incentives (cash and technology in exchange for political and social reform and oil would continue to be purchased at a to-be-determined agreed market rate as the 15-year phase-out would unfurl) to go to Saudi Arabia and its allies, who needed this plan just as much as everyone else. Moreover, the presence of the US in Saudi Arabia was a key driver in bringing the world to this point in the first place; a plan that would hasten America's departure from Saudi land would satisfy a key demand among extremists intent on punishing Saudi Arabia for this liaison. The integration of After-Oil s principles, much like that of post-World War II s European project, was defined by a rolling process. As quarterly global meetings on After-Oil unfolded, new power blocs emerged. In 2013, Brazil and Russia attempted to leverage their energy independence in a bid to gain access to better technology and increase their global 6

standing as great powers by joining North America and EU as the oil- and ethanol-providing heroes in the narrative. Furthermore, their participation (in concert with the US and EU) acted as a check against China's unequal resource consumption. In an annual After-Oil meeting held at the start of 2015, as economies were constrained by drier and hotter weather patterns, Brazil and Russia were promised increased leverage in the deal by being given economic advantages for water and food resource provision as part of the After-Oil new rule-set. Throughout 2013, China s response seesawed between stinging criticism and diplomatic ambivalence. But by 2015, it struck at what it saw as opportunity. Its hoarding of resources through equity stakes in oil companies around the world gave it first access to oil at sweetheart prices, but China knew that it was wearing out its welcome in many countries as resources dwindled through consumption and climate change. Unwilling to manage globally spread-out instability it considered the risks against the benefits. As the world's leading alternative fuel product developer (especially in green batteries and electric cars whose clunky designs had failed to capture better market share than less efficient-but-better-designed models from US and Europe), China realized that to get a lot, it had to give a little. China held the cards in first access to oil reserves both conventional and unconventional, and it also held the advantage in alternative energy products and generation. In 2015, in an effort to gain bargaining leverage in global institutions like the WTO, and to reinforce its status as a great power, China signed on to the After-Oil movement. In return for its participation, China negotiated preferred pricing for its alternative fuel products (wind turbines, cars, fuel cells, etc.). But its long-term strategy hinged on participation in the After-Oil scheme as an opportunity to ultimately negotiate and accelerate a move away from dollar seigniorage. As an After-Oil member, China introduced the idea of future oil trading in the 15-year mitigation phase done against a carbon peg, rather than the dollar. The US, at first adamantly opposed, knew it would need to soften its position to hold the After-Oil alliance together but that it could draw the process out to its advantage. The Sunni-Shia regional sectarian conflict that engulfed states beyond the Gulf served as a constant reminder of the costs of After-Oil s failure. By 2016, conditions in the Middle East remained volatile. Although Turkey had attempted to play a mediating role in the affairs of the region since 2011, governance transitions in such countries as Egypt, Libya and Syria remained unstable and occasionally violent; orchestrating civil society was proving far harder than anticipated in such hollowed-out states. Attempted coups in Iraq and Syria surfaced and were repelled, but not without bloodshed and residual instability within the surviving governments. Israel and Palestine remained locked in mistrust and regular ground skirmishes. But it was the constant threat of Wahhabist extremism that reinforced an awareness of the region s intractability. After-Oil was a tough sell. In the US, cries of "socialism" and worse in Congress caused the President to issue an executive order to officially instate After-Oil in 2016 a move aided by the election of the subsequent President, a Democrat, who won on an energy and environment platform that appealed to a fearful public. Party loyalists in the 7

entertainment industries were directed to create a national public awareness campaign to spur compliance and patriotic support. This achieved a certain amount of success. The generational shift towards "values-driven" professions that began a decade before drove an early bubble in the green sustainability movement, but by 2016, awareness of the need to change American consumer behavior matured into recognition of global necessity. Adults in their early and mid-30s crowed over doing their bit by biking to work, driving electric hybrid vehicles, powering their media devices with solar panels, using human-powered generators for small electricity needs, and building home-made ethanol stills in their backyards. Many prominent media and political observers hailed the program as the most important next step in the evolution of America's Information Age economy. But not everyone bought it. Banks and industries were forced to comply with a fundamental change in free-market capitalism thanks to the global regulation and standardization, pooling and rationing After-Oil imposed. Elites accustomed to big bonuses and massive payouts across sectors like energy, banking, insurance and more, cried foul and decried After-Oil as "un-American." By the end of 2017, industry lawsuits launched against the government tripled in the first year of the program. The backlog in the courts compared with the foreclosures backlog almost a decade earlier, leading to the same result: inertia, leaving plaintiffs little choice but to quit grousing and carry on the best they could. By 2019, several multi-national corporations redirected their energies into new fuel and retrofit technologies, some of which attained early credibility and adoption, but most initial projects yielded bubbles before new fields became viable another decade down the road. However, corporate fat-cats were not the only resisters: the 900,000 Americans who lost their jobs in the first two years of the program, many of whom were from lower economic, less educated classes based outside of America's coastal metropolises, were apoplectic. Denied free use of their gas-powered cars and air conditioners (a necessity in the hotter weather brought on by climate change), citizens in the southern and western U.S. caused sporadic riots. In Europe and Russia, where energy efficiency protocols and socialized economic reforms were considered more culturally normative and had enjoyed success in reducing car use, After-Oil had easier acceptance. Russia in particular gained industry partnering opportunities as it acquired new technologies and income for its prized oil, water and food resources. In Latin America, Brazil was catapulted to prominence by the "After-Oil" scheme; national champion Petrobras, long the leader in ethanol and renewable and alternative energies, accelerated their technological programs to yield first adoption of its products and processes by other countries. Venezuela, which abandoned its membership in OPEC in the hopes of capitalizing on high oil rates immediately after the Saudi Arabian crisis, experienced a downward spiral as AfterOil kept prices lower and stable. Allies like Bolivia and Peru at first resisted entreaties to join the After-Oil scheme a stance insisted upon by Venezuela's leader but ultimately saw their fortunes lay in the larger global alliance of pooled resources and technology.

The Asian picture was more complicated. India, whose Saudi oil dependence left them little choice but to accede to After-Oil in exchange for a per capita slice of the reserves pie, forced its middle class to give up their gas-guzzling gains, provoking civil unrest and political instability. Eventually, foreign direct investment in methane hydrates found off the nation's eastern coast helped to mitigate part of its transport and food consumption needs. Other emerging economies like Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, some of whom had their own oil industries, experienced boom-bust cycles as their economies adjusted to the realities of After-Oil. Limited in their ability to switch to alternative fuels, South-East Asian economies were gripped at first by riots resulting from increased food and energy commodity prices and concomitant inflation. As they struggled to adjust their monetary policies, aided by newly created After-Oil departments in the World Bank and IMF, pressures eased within five years. China, whose commitment to the program waxed and waned on the basis of its own self-interest, covertly purchased cheap oil from Iran and elsewhere along the Gulf. While at first these breaches went undiscovered, leaks via dissidents led to exposure and censure from other nations. China continued to cooperate with After-Oil, even though its car industry failed to become the world's next General Motors. China's primary interest lay in maintaining the peg off the dollar, so it continued to risk penalties for its ongoing repeated infractions. The new rules of globalization that After-Oil created were spurned by several Middle Eastern nations, still locked in seemingly endless sectarian conflict. Saudi Arabia, where the attack on its main industry and ruling family shook its existential raison d'etre to its core, became trapped in preserving its status quo, spending money on arms and security while watching its single industry's decline towards its terminal fate over the next 50 years. Attempts at encouraging citizens to create new industries and work were failures. Other Gulf states experienced similar states of decline and slipped into tribalism and sectarianism. By 2020, After-Oil became known as the first phase of the post-petroleum Globalization 3.0 era.

Scenario II: ARCTIC HEAT [a realist scenario] Climate change accelerated pressure on Great Power politics after 2010, but it was not the singular factor in the struggle over resources. During 2012, pivotal electoral events served a catalytic role in the conflagration that erupted over energy in 2018. Some of those events were not changes from the status quo: in Russia, Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President, a revision of title from his immediately previous service as Prime Minister, but a re-entrenchment of the power he had been wielding over the country for more than a decade. The modest liberal reforms begun by his predecessor Dmitry Medvedev were all but extinguished by Putin s protection of oligarch cronies and the statist, export-led model built chiefly on Russia s vast oil and gas reserves. Despite increasing market prices for fuel, Russia s extraction capacity was still disproportionately uncompetitive as a result of its aged infrastructure, thereby earning Russia 30% less on the petrodollar compared to the Gulf states and elsewhere. Putin s rejection of Medvedev s fledgling attempts at reform in the legal and banking sectors only exacerbated the energy earnings problem by scaring off critically-needed foreign direct investment in equipment and technologies. Nevertheless, Putin used the media to sell a glorified image of a revitalized Russia, flush with oil and gas wealth that would only increase with the opening of the Arctic to further resource exploration. Mirroring its Cold War rival, the United States re-elected Barack Obama in 2012 after a year of vituperative stumping from Republican candidates that further split the country s electorate into partisan camps. Just as he had encountered upon entering office for his first term, Obama confronted an economic morass of existential proportions: the 2011-2012 sovereign debt crisis in Europe not only fractured the Eurozone and its currency, it destroyed 35% of the equity held by American banks at a time when they were still recovering from the solvency emergencies of 2008. Although the shattering of the Euro posed an investment boon thanks to dollar seigniorage, the effect was limited by China s use of the European financial disaster as an opportunity to diversify and turn away from US Treasury bond debt purchases; in 2012, China worked through over USD$100 billion in sovereign wealth reserves by buying up Italian, Greek and Spanish ports and factories, as well as recapitalizing moribund French banks. The American economic future looked bleaker still in the employment arena, as even low-wage jobs dried up during the second recessionary dip of 2012. Consequently, American foreign policy during Obama s second term took a distinct offshore turn as spending cuts drastically limited investment and military expenditure a great contrast to the first term s vigorous pursuit of objectives in the Middle East and South Asia. China s Politburo had a governance milestone of its own in 2012, but one that featured new faces. Li Keqiang succeeded Wen Jiabao as Premier, and Xi Jinping officially took over the presidency from Hu Jintao. Both of these fifth generation leaders had cultivated political pragmatism and loyalty to hardliners within the Communist Party for years; Li worked his way up through the Party as a protg of President Hu despite a reputation for liberal views (rumored to be the reason 10

why he was knocked out of the running for succession to Hu and demoted to the premiership), while Xi was a princeling (son of a Communist Party stalwart to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping). Xi s family connections and military experience were integral to his rise to the top. Both men, while articulating a Chinese foreign policy of nonconfrontation, were seen to favor forceful action in practice both domestically and externally in an effort to retain favor with Party and military supporters who saw populist modernization as a threat to rule. Xi, in contrast to earlier Chinese leaders, was not averse to openly criticizing Western governments. Together Xi and Li initiated limited domestic liberal reforms to accommodate China s growing middle class while externally asserting China as a great power whose scale demanded its due. Chinese exceptionalism reached its zenith under Xi and Li. But Chinese demand for resources had to be tempered in light of China s relationship with Iran: its former President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was ousted in 2012 when the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made good on his promise to ditch the role of presidency through direct election in favor of a parliamentary system in which he could solidify control. Civil unrest broke out in Iran against rule by Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and ports on the Strait of Hormuz were blocked up by protesting laborers interfering with oil exports. As the largest oil importer from Iran, China depended on it for 15% of its total oil use, making Iran China s third largest supplier after Saudi Arabia and Angola. Iran remained unstable and chaotic through 2013, prompting China to put pressure on other resource suppliers to satiate its growth demands. Against the backdrop of electoral transition among the Great Powers, two important hemispheric events would complicate circumstances around the world s energy supply. At the beginning of 2013, Brazil s energy national champion Petrobras concluded the bulk of its geological testing of the pre-salt Santos oil basin fields in the Atlantic Ocean to determine potential yield. When initially discovered in 2008 and 2010 respectively, the Tupi and Libra oil fields alone were estimated to hold a combined total of over 30 billion barrels of oil (an estimate that jumped by more than an additional 10 billion barrels when the smaller Santos fields of Guara and Iracemi were included constituting a combined projected output of 2 million barrels of oil per day by 2020, which represented 10% of US daily oil consumption in 20091). The extensive surveys conducted over more than two years and concluded at the end of 2012 revealed that the total recoverable pre-salt Santos oil was closer to 15 billion barrels. Furthermore, the vessels, drills and special platforms needed for these deepwater reserves (located more than 200km offshore and up to 7000m below the sea-bed), were neither sufficient in availability nor capacity by 2013 to begin extraction. The conclusion of testing dealt a massive blow to Brazil s domestic growth plans, the majority of which were predicated on the Santos oil revenues as the necessary funding for the country s critical infrastructure, technical modernization and

Dom Phillips. Brazil s Oil Frontier: Sub-salt drilling could net billions of barrels. Txchnologist, 23rd August, 2011. http://www.txchnologist.com/2011/brazils-oil-frontier-sub-salt-drilling-could-net-billions-of-barrels-by-dom-philipps

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poverty reduction measures through 2020. Worse, as a result of long-term sweetheart deals Brazil cut with China to swap its highly discounted oil in exchange for non-interest bearing loans needed for the equipment and expertise required to develop and extract the pre-salt oil, Brazil now found itself in a neo-colonial scenario: in addition to the vast agricultural and mining resources China secured from Brazil at discount prices for multi-year terms, China now controlled Brazil s energy future as well. On the other side of the equator, 2013 ushered in the first summer in which ice-breakers were not needed to traverse the Arctic Circle through the Northeast Passage known as the Northern Sea Route (NSR), claimed by Russia as its territory since it most closely follows Russian coastline (although disputed by the US and others as an international shipping route). Until that time, the nations on the Arctic s circumference Canada, US, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland had not achieved substantive agreement over boundaries and issues of sovereignty (apart from the 2010 resolution between Norway and Russia over territory in the Barents Sea). This was due mostly to the fact that the prior year-round ice made such determinations neither immediately pressing nor cost-effective for nations to resolve. The existing institutions created to handle Arctic matters, like the Arctic Council (which dealt with environmental, social and cultural issues) and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), were insufficient frameworks for adjudicating the maddeningly complex claims over sovereign land and territorial internal waters as the polar ice cap melt accelerated. Some states, specifically Canada and Denmark, whose claim terms ran out respectively in 2013 and 2014 under UNCLOS, scrambled at the last minute to resolve their sovereign sea rights; Russia, who had already punted in 2007 by planting a flag on the seabed under the North Pole in a controversial effort to stake a claim to nearly half of the Arctic Ocean, ran submarines and ships under and through contested water with impunity. Cheaper and faster destinational shipping of resources from the Arctic region (as opposed to container shipping transArctically, which was still cost-prohibitive) was the first opportunity yielded by the receding ice: by 2014, summer-period transport of oil, liquid natural gas, coal and other minerals extracted mostly from the Russian Arctic cut shippers costs by more than 40% by almost halving the time required to traverse from Eastern to Western hemispheres and vice versa. More significantly, the promise of future navigable routes began to reshape the patterns of global trade: by affording an alternative to the risky routes through the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca and the South China Sea, and the tolls of the Panama and Suez Canals, trans-Arctic shipping represented opportunity for countries with modern ports and advanced polar-fitted cargo fleets at a time when the instability of the global financial system was at its apex. By 2015, China, flush with new European ports and enough money to buy and build double-hulled ships that conformed to the Polar Code, started fulfilling deals with Norway, Canada and Iceland to build trans-shipment hubs. China was quickly being forced to rethink its energy strategy as it faced confrontation with the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the South China Sea; and as global supply lines experienced strain, first in Iran, and now especially in Brazil, China s eighth 12

largest trading partner. Poor soy crop harvests due to climate change-induced droughts added to the fears stoked by the diminished pre-salt oil and gas reserves. Political pressure and civil unrest in Brazil over what was perceived as Chinese imperialism and tyranny over the country s natural resources deepened rapidly; as Brazil s political economy, so heavily reliant on export, began to roil under the demands of a population forced to pay exorbitant prices for their own food and fuel, a China-out movement emerged. Chinese-owned factories and storehouses in Northern Brazil were torched and boycotts against Chinese goods were widely enacted. While China did not pull out of existing trade agreements with Brazil, it accelerated and enhanced bi-lateral relationships with Finland, Norway, Iceland and Canada for oil, gas, coal, fish and other resources. In an effort to avoid provoking protectionist US and Russian actions in the region, China stuck to deals with the smaller Northern nations. The US, cash-poor and equipped with only two suitable polar vessels, watched uneasily as China built up its naval and aerial military forces and began to solidify its position in the Arctic as it loaned capital, financially assisted critical infrastructure construction for partner states and bought commodities in bulk. Russia who was developing offshore oil fields in the Kara Sea with the US ExxonMobil in a joint venture with its own national oil company Rosneft communicated its parallel concerns to the US, confirming the trouble it was having in assembling a

Northern security force due to its internal demographic challenges. In the summer of 2016, just prior to Obama vacating the White House, the Cold War rivals agreed to a deal: the US would give up its claim that the NSR was an international shipping route and Russia would split the NSR ice-breaker passage fee with the US in exchange, allowing both countries to jointly set a fee high enough to constrain China s movements in the Arctic. To offset protest from countries who previously sided with the US position on the NSR, the US and Russia argued that such a deal was necessary to facilitate the Rosneft-ExxonMobil work. The US and Russia also agreed to partner in the construction of ice-breaker vessels and trans-shipment hubs on the Russian coastline, starting with a state-of-the-art depot and repair facility in Murmansk. Chinese media sources portrayed the US and Russian activity as provocative and aimed at undermining its economy. Xi Jinping was stinging in his criticism of the US, calling the move underhanded and hypocritical and warning the US of consequences in energy economics, directly referencing a withdrawal from the dollar peg. At the end of 2016, as Hillary Clinton prepared to take up the US presidency, hackers recruited through China s Ministry of State Security intelligence apparatus organized a sophisticated covert attack on US and Russian military databases in an effort to retrieve information on naval defenses and Arctic satellite data. The scale and sensitivity of the stolen information, which included plans of the newest nuclear-powered icebreakers and submarines designed for polar use, shunted Arctic affairs up higher on the US list of priorities. After being sworn in 2017 in her first address to the nation, Clinton affirmed cybersecurity as a cornerstone of her administration s platform. Blighted still by economic woes and the perception of Republican (and Democratic) rivals that she would not be tough enough to deal with the variety and size of problems facing the US, Clinton resolved to send a decisive message to China. After conferring with Putin and the chancellor of Germany at the time, Clinton and her allies 13

hatched a plan to develop a software-based seek-and-destroy virus that would infect Chinese computers and delete files of American, Russian or German origin. After almost two years in development and beta testing, the virus was unleashed in late 2018. Despite expectations that the damage would be limited to stolen files bearing classified information, the software s virulence wound up crashing bank systems and transport grids in China. People were prevented from retrieving money from their bank accounts and certain rail lines, including high speed trains, had to be stopped in order to avoid switching problems that could cause collisions and derailments. A miscalculation in how China had set up its internal network architecture caused the virus to have unintended effects that had a far more widespread destructive capacity that affected China s public all told, costing China several hundred billion dollars in damage. The software s creators denied any knowledge of or hand in its creation, but the Chinese were also constrained in their public response. Years of Chinese denials of responsibility over their own cyber-attacks on American and Russian targets would only have been brought into question if they acknowledged the virus capacity to delete files stolen in those attacks. Instead, China asserted its typical criticism of the US in its domestic propaganda; but its political response involved announcing a deal with Iran to purchase its oil through the Kish Exchange the Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) for crude and gas purchases in only rials and euros and bartered trade exchange, thereby circumventing use of the dollar. While this had a nominal effect on existing supply, the switch had a disastrous effect on dollar currency trades and bond activity. The US economy, already hobbled from years of economic damage, sank further into financial malaise as the Dow traded below 6,000 at the start of 2020. Forced to cut spending even further, the Murmansk depot plans were postponed. The US and Russia both faced a new decade with lowered expectations and an unstable multi-polar balance of power.

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Scenario III: AMERICAN DISUNION [a constructivist scenario] By the end of 2011, the viability of Occupy Wall Street as a force for change finally succumbed to collapse; the movement s scattershot approach and inability to channel its message into a coherent plan did little at either the congressional or executive level to change the political and financial status quo of the US capitalist system. News headlines picked up the occasional bursts of violence against gatherings in some cities, but without effective network building, the disparate groupings arrayed across the US and the rest of the world dissolved through attrition and a harsh winter. Meanwhile, the oil billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were solidifying their own citizen mobilizing efforts: the libertarian micro-targeting database they created in 2010, called Themis, exhaustively compiled Tea Party organizations and supporters, conservative think tanks, lobbyists, sympathetic Supreme Court judges and politicians (along with their contact information, occupations and income brackets) into a network that served as an electoral roll of right-wing America. 2 As the principal profiteers behind the controversial Keystone XL pipeline (the 2000-mile transit medium for bringing highly toxic Canadian tar sands oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast), the Kochs needed a powerful network to advance their corporate and political interests in light of vocal opposition. They leveraged Themis and took advantage of the 2010 US Supreme Court decision handed down in Citizens United vs. Federal Electoral Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate donations to political candidates without disclosure. The Kochs envisioned the 2012 presidential campaign as the first test of Themis power: at a June 2011 gathering of fellow billionaires, Charles Koch referred to the 2012 election as the mother of all wars and a battle for the life or death of this country.
3

Ideologically, the anti-government Kochs had long advocated for the removal of the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, the CIA, social security and more a reasonable expectation of the sons of Fred Koch, a founder of the John Birch Society. But their corporate self-interests were also at stake. To maintain the drilling and piping of oil, Koch Industries lifeblood, opposition to all clean-air and climate change environmental regulatory policy, ethanol and alternative/clean energy bills and tax reform was critical. As the election campaign heated up in 2012, the Koch brothers staked almost USD$80million behind Mitt Romney as their preferred candidate. Not only did they put pressure on Romney to espouse their agenda, the Kochs actively used Themis to create a comprehensively targeted media campaign attacking Obama s policies, especially in the energy sector. They bought media time/space on right-wing television networks, talk radio and print outlets to present a series of advertisements and programs whose development they also financed. The programming presented the Kochs vision of a virtually unregulated society, ostensibly free from what was characterized as the stifling and economy-killing

Ed Pilkington. Koch borthers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind. The Guardian, 7 November, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election 3 Ibid.

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policies of the Obama administration; it also stoked fears of an energy-starved country where unpatriotic Democratic short-sightedness prevented oil extraction and refinement necessary to maintain American living standards. The Kochs efforts delivered the intended effect. Cries of drill, baby, drill! resurfaced at Romney gatherings and Romney used energy uncertainty as a wedge issue in his debates with Obama. While the focus on resource uncertainty helped Romney achieve a neck-and-neck run in the polls, it was still not enough to attain victory over the incumbent whose campaign was boosted by digital governance services like AmericansElect.org. However, though Obama returned to the White House for a second term, frustrated voters enticed by the Koch agenda were not content to give up the message, and gave Tea Party-style libertarianism a renewed vigor in 2013. As the political events of 2012 widened the partisan chasm between voters, corporations working in the liquid natural gas sector (LNG) were busy bolstering their own industry s fortunes as an alternative to the Kochs oil agenda. As LNG companies began their rush at the start the decade to buy enormous swaths of land (often from deed-holders who were only too happy to sell as a result of the credit crunch), a spike in demand for natural gas from Asian countries like the tsunami-battered Japan and South Korea pushed American gas suppliers to fast-track drilling in shale deposits and reservoir rocks in large tracts of the American mid-West and North East. Despite warnings and temporary state legislation banning hydrofracking (the controversial process by which water and steam are driven through geological substrate to push gas reserves to the earth s surface for extraction), the intractable jobs situation dictated otherwise. With US unemployment figures still running just over 10% in 2013, many state legislators and governors yielded to corporate interests in the name of providing jobs in what were often rural areas in serious economic decline. In some LNG states, like New York and Pennsylvania, where lowered tax receipts threatened cataclysmic budget deficits, gas drilling was portrayed by politicians as a lifeline to the future. As environmental interests faced the gathering momentum of empowered oil and gas companies, the voices who once decried capitalists running roughshod over the so-called 99% during Occupy Wall Street were stilled. Fatigue from the abandoned protests of 2011 and the new media onslaught generated by the Kochs in 2012 had set in during the brutal election campaign. While some bloggers attempted to maintain pressure on the collusion between the corporate sector and government, the activists power was effectively blunted. Instead, the populist mood shifted to the perspective of America s conservative constituency, the majority of whom appeared unswayed by the fact that the candidates and measures they supported often conflicted with their own self-interests. Motivated by oil and gas industry threats of an America weakened by Democratic, economy-destroying environmental protectionism in the face of diminishing fuel supplies; a rising China; and a President deemed in over his head, conservative backers of deregulation aggressively challenged both the government and OWS demand for tighter reform. The romanticism of Tea Party patriotism gained the upper hand in public debate, thanks to the media savvy of its financiers.

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But at the start of 2014, a 5.8 earthquake radiated outwards from the Marcellus Shale deposit in upstate New York. Poorly managed hydrofracking triggered the seismic event, its epicenter found in New York s Orange County, approximately 50 miles from the Indian Point nuclear power plant. While little residential damage was done and the Indian Point structure was deemed secure, outrage exploded on New York City streets again: benzene, one of the chemicals used in fracking, had leached into the New York City Watershed, making the city s tap water unsafe for drinking. Protests erupted once more near City Hall, but the demonstrators in 2014 looked different from the OWS crowd that once occupied Zucotti Park: the wealthier denizens of New York joined together with citizens from all economic classes to demand action. The cost of supplying fresh water to the city s eight million residents averaged in the billions of dollars, consequently worsening New York s financial outlook. A state of emergency was declared in New York and the stock market lost 1000 points in the first two days of the crisis. The benzene leak posed the greatest health threat to babies and young children, which consequently mobilized a unique subset of activists: young, affluent New York City mothers, social media-proficient and predisposed to supporting ecofriendly issues, became the most vociferous protesters and most efficient organizers. Their message and style proved irresistible to the media, which took up their cause as a new front in the wars of political partisanship. They called themselves Mothers for America (MOFAM). At the beginning of 2015, this enterprising group, financially backed by private donors (in some cases consisting of participants hedge-fund manager husbands), recast the traditional red state vs. blue state sectarianism into a an existential debate of green vs. brown the eco-conscious as true patriots concerned for American survival versus Tea

Party and Republican supporters as the lackeys and willing dupes of the oil companies and their money. Angry over the unresolved ongoing dangers the benzene leak posed for their children and New York City residents, they channeled their frustration into a campaign that brought the longstanding social and cultural fissures within American society into sharp relief. Class, religious belief, education and race became focal points of debate between the two sides. By virtue of MOFAM s status as highly educated New Yorkers, critics attacked them for their inability to relate to the lives and needs of those who lived in the heartland. The MOFAM movement was dismissed by opponents for being too rich, too white, too atheist and too out of touch with America and its need to ensure the American way of life. Although environmental awareness raised by the dangers of unregulated energy sourcing and the political lobbying that helped sustain it served as MOFAM s overarching message, the criticism galvanized the group to mirror its opponents tactics so it could evolve from a protest movement into a political action group. Several of the women involved were media professionals, and helped establish a bulwark against the conservative pundits who automatically opposed their agenda. In short, they used their feminine wiles: in much the same way earlier Republican campaign advisors cynically selected candidates like Sarah Palin, MOFAM organizers identified the most attractive and articulate members for media visibility. They cannily built a branded image based on motherhood and protection of the young and they juxtaposed evocative images of cozy family life against a dark future guaranteed by the greed and disregard of billionaires. 17

Ultimately, they unlike the organizers behind OWS created an image that became difficult to assail, lest a critic be seen as attacking the institution of motherhood. Re-energized by the debate stirred by MOFAM, members of OWS joined their cause. Assisted by hindsight however, the directors of MOFAM rejected the leaderless, agenda-less philosophy that cratered OWS, and instead built MOFAM into a slick machine. Like the Koch brothers, they developed a targeted agenda with accompanying media messages; they compiled email and press lists; they organized nation-wide coffee klatsches; they appeared with Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, and a wide array of other celebrities who appealed to middle-America. MOFAM released weekly messages identifying corporations and their lobbyists, especially those engaged in practices that could potentially environmentally harm citizens. They also addressed the employment crisis in America; MOFAM targeted politicians who voted against Obama administration jobs bills out of political partisanship and conducted truth-finding campaigns against them. Using digital partners like AmericansElect.com, MOFAM created a database to rival that of Themis, and correlated it to an emerging industries online network. Despite the Kochs efforts and swept up by MOFAM s momentum, a Democrat won the election in 2016 albeit in a close race. At the start of 2017, however, reality settled over the election fervor. Energy demand was outstripping supply and alternative sources were not sufficient to cover the gap. Republican and Tea Party pressure was doubled on the new incumbent President, mostly through aggressive punditry financed by the Kochs. Accusations regarding the President s past were trumped up, including charges of personal as well as professional impropriety. The fundamental schism between liberal, progressive values and those of anti-government supporters was never resolved by the election. With the economy still bumping along the bottom of a trough, and as prices at the pump shot up to $5.50 gallon and heating costs doubled from the previous year, public ire was directed at the President. MOFAM, headquartered in New York, was consumed with local energy-related initiatives and could not fully engage in the war of words and ideas to the extent it did prior to the election. While it kept a sideline focus on ways to break political gridlock, it redirected most of the members energies to tying local employment initiatives with alternative energy plans, such as the introduction of solar panel blankets over city landfills; the construction of wind turbines in city parks; and tidal-power experiments in the Hudson and East rivers. Meanwhile, conservatives saw this as a chance to direct their energies to a sweeping change in governance, namely the abolition of the Electoral College so that thirdparty candidates had better access to the presidency. Charles Koch, consumed with the idea of running for President, made the Electoral College change a new focal point of his and his brother s quest. At the beginning of 2018, the Kochs established energy rallies throughout the country gatherings where attendees were given vouchers for heating oil (supplied by Koch subsidiary Flint Hills Resources) in return for signing on their support for the Koch platform. By the end of the year, the energy rallies had become so wellattended that they took on a life of their own: what were once events of a few hours became all-day, then all-weekend 18

affairs, providing attendees not only with valuable supplies they needed during the economic and energy crises, but also with community. Whole families would attend, thereby allowing young people to absorb the party line of antigovernment sentiment. Towards the end of the decade, the rallies had become powerful points of concentration for public anger towards the government, as well as any other movement to which it was opposed. Effigies were burned sometimes those of the President, sometimes those of other liberal figureheads, including members of MOFAM, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. A calamitous and combative sentiment suffused the movement, along with a sense of urgency. At the beginning of 2020, as Presidential primaries were underway and gearing up for the November elections, a riot erupted at a Koch energy rally in Iowa. Environmental protestors aligned with OWS and MOFAM unfurled a banner decrying the damage Koch Industries subsidiaries had done to mid-Western farmland and ecosystems. As Koch supporters raced to pull the banner down, the protestors were engulfed by a mob of rally attendees who beat and kicked them. Three of the four protestors were critically injured; one of them died a few days later from head wounds sustained in the attack. A tone-deaf response by Charles Koch to the violence blamed the policies of the current administration as being responsible for the public desperation that led to the violence. But the graphic footage of the event, broadcast around the world, did nothing to help the Kochs case: their Electoral College challenge failed and national demonstrations of the greens versus the browns were re-ignited. Though Charles Koch did not win the Presidency in 2020, the continuing economic hardship and energy shortages locked the ideological differences between progressives and conservatives into what seemed a permanently alternating cycle of struggle. For the time being however, as the US entered the third decade of the millennium, the liberals controlled the high ground.

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REFERENCES Anonymous. Battle for the Arctic Heats Up. CBC News Canada, 20th August 2010. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2009/02/27/f-arctic-sovereignty.html Exner-Pirot, Heather. How Fast Will Arctic Shipping Grow? Alaska Dispatch, 11th April, 2011. http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/how-fast-will-arctic-shipping-grow?page=0,0 Greenwald, Robert. The Kochs Keystone Clique Exposed. The Guardian, 7th September, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/08/koch-brothers-keystone-cliqueexposed?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487 Hong, Nong. Arctic Energy: Pathway to Conflict or Cooperation in the High North? Journal of Energy Security, May 2011. http://www.ensec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=310:arctic-energy-pathway-to-conflictor-cooperation-in-the-high-north&catid=116:content0411&Itemid=375 Kramer, Andrew and Krauss, Clifford. Russia Embraces Offshore Arctic Drilling. New York Times, 15th February, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/global/16arctic.html?_r=1 Luft, Gal and Korin, Anne. The Sino-Saudi Connection. Commentary, March 2004. http://www.iags.org/china.htm Luft, Gal. Fueling the dragon: China s race into the oil market. Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, 2003. http://www.iags.org/china.htm Petrov, Krassimir. The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse. Energy Bulletin, 17th January, 2006. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/12125 Pilkington, Ed. Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind. The Guardian, 7 November, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/07/koch-brothers-database-2012-election Ragner, Claes Lykke. The Northern Sea Route. Norden Association Yearbook, 2008. http://www.fni.no/doc&pdf/clrnorden-nsr-en.pdf Romero, Simon. Tensions Over Chinese Mining Venture in Peru. New York Times, 14h August, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/americas/15chinaperu.html US-China Trade Statistics and China s World Trade Statistics, The US-China Business Council. https://www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html Weitz, Dr. Richard. Russia The non-reluctant Arctic power. Second Line of Defense, 12th February, 2011. http://www.sldinfo.com/russia%E2%80%99s-recent-arctic-moves-the-non-reluctant-arctic-power/ Yergin, Daniel. The Quest: Energy, Security and the Re-making of the Modern World. New York: Penguin Press HC, September 2011

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