Center for a New American Security

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration has decided to withdraw its demand for countries pursuing nuclear energy development to relinquish their right to produce nuclear fuel domestically. This is a significant shift from a 2009 agreement between the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that prohibits the UAE from enriching uranium domestically or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.

According to The Wall Street Journal report, administration officials cited concerns that U.S. nuclear plant developers could lose a share of the market with a stringent requirement attached to nuclear-cooperation agreements that bound countries from developing domestic sources of nuclear fuel. “U.S. companies once controlled at least 50% of the world market for building nuclear reactors,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “This share has dwindled to around 20%, U.S. officials say, with Russian, French and South Korean companies gaining dominance,” and officials have cautioned that “Washington risked losing business for American companies seeking to build nuclear reactors overseas” if the United States continued to push the nuclear-cooperation agreement requirement.

Moreover, U.S. officials cited concerns that losing nuclear plant development to non-U.S. developers could weaken U.S. efforts to encourage countries to promote stronger nonproliferation safeguards and policies. “To the extent we lose market share, we lose nonproliferation controls and hurt national security,” a senior U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. military officially declared an end to its mission in Iraq today. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, speaking in Baghdad, said that Iraq has shown remarkable progress in the past nine years. However, as with many countries transitioning to democracy, “Iraq will be tested in the days ahead — by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself,” Secretary Panetta said. Beyond the sectarian violence and a potentially aggressive Iran on its border, the Iraqi government will continue to face many of the perennial challenges it has been grappling with for the last nine years: reliable access to electricity, water and other basic services that the government is working to provide.

Despite U.S. and other government investments in Iraq since 2003, basic services are still largely unreliable. According to Al Jazeera, “Power cuts are routine, and millions of Iraqis lack regular access to clean water, proper hospitals, or basic infrastructure.” These challenges could hamstring Iraq’s economy, especially as the country looks to draw in foreign businesses to promote economic development. “Unemployment officially stands at around 16 per cent,” Al Jazeera reported. “Many Iraqis say the real number is nearly twice that high, especially among young Iraqis. The only reliable employer is the government, which provides jobs for nearly 40 per cent of the workforce.” Bloomberg reports that the government is trying to attract foreign business, including from U.S. hotel operators and developers. However, “A possible lack of fresh water, electricity and communications systems also can be obstacles to doing business in the country.”

Yesterday, U.S. and Chinese officials met in Beijing for their annual military review, known as the Defense Consultative Talks. The meeting between the countries’ senior defense officials comes on the heels of President Obama’s trip to the Asia-Pacific where he emphasized a greater U.S. military presence (including in Australia), and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement that the United States will pivot from the Middle East to Asia as it draws down from its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the talks, Chinese General Ma Xiaotian urged the United States and China “to enhance communication, to expand common ground, to promote mutual understanding.” Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy said she hoped the two militaries could “agree on issues and interests that the two sides share.”

As policymakers look for opportunities to strengthen military ties, they should consider environmental cooperation, in particular humanitarian and disaster response and climate adaptation, which may facilitate better cooperation between the two countries, serving as a means for confidence building and increasing transparency that could help defuse tensions over the expanding U.S. and Chinese naval presence in the Western Pacific, including the South China Sea. 

In January, CNAS will release its study on the South China Sea, including a chapter on how natural resources affect the behavior of states in the region. There has been a lot of attention paid to natural resources and whether or not competition over access to oil, natural gas, fisheries and minerals could lead to conflict in the region. Too often the issues are over-simplified though, and there is either an implicit or explicit assumption that it’s competition over natural resources that could lead to overt conflict. But natural resources have a more nuanced role in international relations, particularly in the South China Sea, and understanding this role can actually enable states to manage their resource issues and avoid instability and conflict.

Competition over natural resources is rarely, if ever, the sole precipitator of conflict. [There is a vast literature on this topic, and though I won’t develop a literature review here, there are some notable sources worth exploring, including the work by our friends at Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and their New Security Beat blog.] Instead, tensions related to competition over natural resources have the potential to exacerbate existing diplomatic or political grievances between states, which can contribute to instability or conflict.  But there are ways to relieve tensions over natural resources. Indeed, where competition over natural resources appears to lead to instability or conflict, it is more often than not a proxy for other challenges states are facing, particularly with governance or other related trends.

Last Monday, Businessweek published an excerpt from a new book by David Fairhall, Cold Front: Conflict Ahead in Arctic Waters. Besides the provocative title (which, by focusing on conflict does not help further our understanding about the challenges and opportunities that lie in the Arctic), the book looks rather interesting.

In the excerpt from Businessweek, Fairhall describes in brief the history of polar icebreakers, including their evolution to nuclear propulsion in Russia. “Today, a dozen countries operate icebreakers. Canada needs them in large numbers to cope with winter, not only in the Arctic but also in the St. Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. Scandinavians use them to keep Baltic ports clear,” Fairhall writes. “The U.S. has strategic and scientific interests in both the Arctic and Antarctica, for which it has three polar-class vessels.”

Yet where it gets interesting – at least from a national security perspective – is the gap between U.S. and Russian icebreaking capabilities. As Fairhall explains, “Still, no one disputes the predominance that Russia achieved by adapting nuclear propulsion to icebreaking. These vessels need a great deal of power and the ability sometimes to remain at sea for long periods without refueling -- both things that a nuclear reactor can deliver.”

The Defense Science Board’s new report, Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security, is getting some good traction. As I promised in my lengthy post on Tuesday, I’m continuing to mine the report to pull out the most interesting findings and recommendations.

What is interesting (and certainly a welcomed message) is the report’s recommendation to bolster U.S. civilian satellite programs that generate environmental and climate data. According to the authors, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should, “Work with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration [NASA] to conduct a renewed study of options for increasing the availability of low-cost, high-reliability launch vehicles for civil science satellites critical for climate observations.”

The recommendation comes at a time when America’s declining earth monitoring satellite capability is raising concerns that the United States is quickly approaching a capability gap that could hamper our ability to understand near- and long-term changes to the environment, including their implications for U.S. national security. In August, Christine Parthemore and I wrote in Blinded: The Decline of U.S. Earth Monitoring Capabilities and Its Consequences for National Security that “By 2016, only seven of NASA’s current 13 earth monitoring satellites are expected to be operational, leaving a crucial information gap that will hinder national security planning,” and that losing satellite-based earth monitoring capabilities will affect U.S. national security, given that DOD, USAID, the State Department and others rely on the information generated by those satellites for crucial planning purposes.

Last Thursday, the Defense Science Board (DSB) released its report on climate change and security, Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security. The report stems from an April 2010 memo from Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics Dr. Ashton Carter (now the Deputy Secretary of Defense) who charged the DSB to create a taskforce to explore current and emerging environmental and climate change trends and their implications for U.S. national security, and to recommend how the Department of Defense should coordinate with other U.S. government agencies to dampen the consequences of climate impacts. 

The report focuses largely on climate implications in Africa “due to the vulnerability of African nations with high potential to intersect with United States national interests.” It is worth pointing out as well that there is more data available on the sociopolitical and environmental implications of climate change in Africa than most other regions of the world, most notably because of the work from the University of Texas, Austin’s Climate Change Political Stability Program (CCAPS), which received DOD support through the Minerva initiative – a program that allows DOD to invest in academic institutions to “develop the intellectual capital necessary to meet the challenges of operating in a changing and complex environment.” I point this out because Minerva is one of the programs that congressional appropriators are reviewing, and CCAPS and other research programs supported by Minerva have demonstrated that the initiative does actually provide that intellectual capital that DOD officials are looking for in order to better understand the future security environment.  

The annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is underway in Honolulu. Trade representatives from the United States, China and 19 other countries will meet this week to discuss, among other things, a U.S. proposal for a Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade plan touted as the largest plan since the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement. While most eyes will be focused on the TPP, another important agenda item worth following is the U.S. proposal for APEC countries to pledge to reduce tariffs on environmental goods – including green technologies like solar panels and wind and hydroelectric turbines – to 5 percent.

Supporters of the U.S. proposal have praised the Obama administration’s efforts to push the plan as a positive step in helping promote U.S. green economic growth. According to Reuters, “It's an environmental plan for the Asia-Pacific region that even President Barack Obama's harshest Republican critic could love: cut taxes paid by corporations and reduce market-distorting regulation.”

Despite slow economic recovery, the global green energy market continues to grow, with foreign markets offering significant opportunities for U.S. green energy companies. “A 2010 Commerce Department report said the global market for environmental technologies was $782.4 billion in 2008 and the United States was by far the largest single market, accounting for $299.5 billion of the total,” reported Reuters. That same Commerce Department report found that “foreign markets, particularly those of developing countries, continue to grow at a higher rate and offer the most opportunities for U.S. companies.”

There was a large spread in The New York Times yesterday on the coming age of unconventional oil and natural gas – that is, oil and natural gas from deepwater reserves, oil sands, shale rock formations and the Arctic. The article is worth reading at length to understand how technology is changing the landscape of available energy resources and what it could mean for heavy energy consuming states, especially in the near term.

“The United States may now have the means to reduce its half century of dependence on the Middle East. China and India may have the means to fuel the development of their growing middle classes. Japan and much of Europe may have the chance to reduce dependence on nuclear power,” The New York Times reported. “And, at least theoretically, poor African countries might be able to lift themselves out of poverty.”

There are important caveats to the above claims, of course. First, one must remember that relieving U.S. dependence on Middle East oil is in large part symbolic more than anything else. Oil is part of a global market where prices are set, and disruptions to the global oil market will affect the price of oil for everyone, everywhere, including oil produced from reserves in North America. Thus, price volatility will continue to be a concern as long as we are largely dependent on fossil fuels. And while The New York Times reports that “new fuels should moderate future price increases,” one must remember several trends too, including that as the global economy recovers and industrial production rebounds in developed and developing states, consumption will quickly increase and prices could also rise sharply if demand outpaces production. Finally, one must remember that continuing to develop fossil fuel resources will, as The New York Times cautions, “probably [make] solutions to climate change, and the development of renewable energy, even more difficult.” These are important externalities to keep in mind.

Last week we revisited the geoengineering debate in light of the recent Bipartisan Policy Center’s report recommending that the U.S. government be prepared to counter the effects of global climate change through climate remediation – that is, by engineering the climate. In particular, we emphasized the need to understand the foreign policy dilemmas that are likely to arise from engineering the global climate. This week we turn to the technical feasibility of actually doing it.  

Later today Dr. Tim Persons, the Government Accountability Office’s Chief Scientist and author of the latest report, Climate Engineering: Technical Status, Future Directions, and Potential Responses, will discuss the future of climate engineering technologies at an event at the Wilson Center. Several of the GAO report’s findings are worth highlighting in advance of that discussion though. According to the report:

Climate engineering technologies are not now an option for addressing global climate change, given our assessment of their maturity, potential effectiveness, cost factors, and potential consequences. Experts told us that gaps in collecting and modeling climate data, identified in government and scientific reports, are likely to limit progress in future climate engineering research.

The report evaluated the most and least advanced options for engineering the climate. “To assess the current state of climate engineering technology, we rated each technology for its maturity on a scale of 1 to 9, using technology readiness levels (TRL)—a standard tool for assessing the readiness of emerging technologies before full-fledged production or incorporation into an existing technology or system,” the report stated. Any technology with a TRL score below 6 is considered immature by technical standards and “may face challenges with respect to potential effectiveness, cost factors, and potential consequences.”