Water, Energy and Future Peace (Part I)

In times of war, certain powers have remained neutral – offering distrustful first and second force nations a “third force” to seek peaceful paths not available in the zero-sum game dictated by the laws of the jungle.??In World War II, Switzerland played this role.??In the Cold War, it was Finland.??Recently, the low-profile nation of Oman has mediated between the United States and regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia.??As the temperature of great power competition between China and the United States rises, forces of nature more powerful than any human force are introducing complex variables to complicate the broken linear calculus between first and second force powers.??As the tide of COVID-19 ebbs and the devastating realities of climate change flow in humanity's collective consciousness – a powerful third force has emerged.??It flows in a circular cycle above, below, around, and between us.??It is the flow of water.

It has been two years since the mysterious SARS-CoV-2 virus spread from China across the world – crippling economies, reshaping global trade and security alliances, denying access to food, fueling competing narratives, and stoking our worst fears.??Most significantly, a virus has magnified for all to see the fragile web of human fault lines that divide us – routinely breaking open to drown brave visions of peace in the red-hot magma of violent conflict.

Our world today is troubled – a fractured global ecosystem riddled with deceit, dysfunction, and distrust.??We forget, but the intertwined roots of our past explain the fractured family tree that drapes above us today – casting humanity’s soul in a single broken shadow.??

History explains why.??

The root system of our past is complex, yet simple.??Deep within our past, two twisted roots grip stubbornly to the others – forcing their way through the sticky earth below.??They have shaped our heritage, identity, and psyche – steadily molding the confused sculpture of who we have become.??Like the great?divide and conquer?games of our past, they have weakened us inside – tempting us to surrender to the forces of fear and confusion that brought us here.??Today they are our demons, clawing us towards the swirling black hole that we alone have created.??Like a mountain stream rushing towards the cliff – the time to reshape our sculpture is slipping mercilessly away.??Yet – no matter how far down the wrong fork we have flowed – we can still change.??

There is still time.?

We can rebuild the broken trust in our family, renew the toxic rivers of our ecosystem, and re-energize the desolate streams of our soul.? In watering the roots of our higher selves, we can wash away the demons.??If we fail, the dark roots will become us, and we – the skeletons of humanity – will become fossils of a bygone era.??The faces of our children, shimmering above the parched desert, will come to us in haunted future dreams to ask – why did you let fear conquer you??

These are the twisted roots that grip us, and only we can change them:

1)?????The unsustainable linear economy.

2)?????The zero-sum game between nations.

Deep within the desiccated soil of our past, they are welded tightly together by the?Paradigm of Scarcity within our DNA that fires the limbic brain to ravenously acquire, horde, consume, and weaponize finite resources to quell our fears and insecurities as we gain leverage, power, and control over our fellow man – so we can acquire, horde, consume, and waste some more.??

In the last 120 years, no resource has triggered these instincts of fear within us with more devastating impact than the non-renewable black gold of which we thirstily suck down 15 billion liters per day across the world.[1]??In these brief 120 years, the vicious and sophisticated zero-sum game we have developed around the linear flow of oil has hardened our sculpture, weakened our resilience, and deeply reshaped the human experience on earth.??

In the last twenty-four months – as we’ve wrestled with the implicit and hidden meanings of a virus – an energy transition from hydrocarbons to renewables has accelerated across the globe. As we claw our way forward, the tremors of old wars reverberate along brittle borders and cultural fault lines across our small, interconnected planet.??Our wounds of the past remain raw and painful – cemented into our souls and genetic memory by inter-generational tides of bitterness, anger, hatred and fear.??

In this complex?in between moment, it is the flow of water – and how we choose to steer it – that has the power to answer the desperate cries echoing between us across a divided, confused, and fearful global landscape.??

Like oil, water can be weaponized to intimidate, divide and control our fellow man with a form of violence and viciousness that is hard to imagine.??Some are already choosing this path.??It could be our death knell.??But – unlike oil – water flows in an infinite circular cycle.??It renews and can be renewed.??It has the power to douse the flames of war, quench the parched earth of our confused souls, and carry us through the storm into a new era of reform, regeneration, and renewal.??Water has the power to heal.??

Water has the power to unify.??

Oil, Fire and War

Eighteen years ago, I climbed the wooden stairs to my home outside a US Marine Corps base on the edge of the Ulupa’u Crater – a steep volcanic cone formed by an explosion of red-hot magma in the center of the Pacific Ocean five hundred thousand years before.??It was 21 March 2003, and I was 24 years old.?

As a young man, I both feared and sought war.??It was a paradox that had lived deep within me for years.??Beginning as a child, many years of vivid imagery and preparation had culminated on this day.??Yet I was not where I believed I belonged – rolling into battle with my brothers.??

The rubber soles of my leather boots gripped the wooden floor as I approached the television set and flipped on CNN.??A hundred racing thoughts inside me slowed down as the words of a World War I poet in my father’s voice echoed within the passages of my memories.??

Here is the frontier, here our camp and place ---

Beans for the pot, fodder for horses,

And Roman arms. Enough. He who among us

At full gallop, the bowstring to his ear,

Let’s drive his heavy arrows, to sink

Stinging through Persian corslets damascened,

Then follows with the lance --- he has our love.[2]?

As a young boy, on cold nights around the fire, he had told me the stories.??His father leaving a young family to fight in the deserts of North Africa in World War II, his uncle parachuting into France on D-Day, and his grandfather – fighting first in the Spanish-American War in Cuba and later in the jungles of the Southern Philippines in the early 1900s as the United States moved in to occupy the power vacuum left by the receding colonial powers of Europe.??

The paradox of war to secure peace was programmed deeply into me.??It flowed in the DNA of my family’s blood.??In those moments, I imagined myself leading brave young men into a desperate future battle, shielded by the white cloud of my ancestors above me.??It would be my baptism in a raging river I dreamed I could one day steer towards a calm ocean of future peace.??

But now I saw my war.??8,000 miles away, it unfolded before me in real-time.??In the years ahead, it would change me in ways I could never have predicted.??News tickers of the first American killed slipped across the screen.??Then I saw the image.??Burning oil and black smoke soaring above the desert.??And Shane’s face.??His sharp brown eyes looking back at me – keen, alert, resolute – and deep with purpose.??A warrior monk – like the bravest of those who went before us.??I watched the screen, unable to break my gaze as Shane floated away with the soundbites – his ancient warrior eyes seared into my soul like a white mirage floating above the desert.??My throat tightened as something cemented inside me.?

In the years ahead, hundreds of thousands more would join Shane – each a uniquely shaped silhouette of broken dreams above the parched desert sand.??Marines and soldiers, hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children, and young men from across the Muslim world who – like us – were inspired to fight and die in the name of something they were told is far greater and more important than their own lives.???

In?War is a Racket, legendary US Marine Corps General Smedley Butler – one of only nineteen Americans to win the Medal of Honor twice – had the following to say following his career of military service and sacrifice:

?I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.??I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.??I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.??I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.??I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.??I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.??In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.??Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.[3]

Butler famously described a racket as “something that is not what it seems to the majority of people” and that only a “small inside group” knows what it is actually about.??It is conducted for the “benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.”3

Circular Madness and Britain’s Narcotics Strategy

The year is 2022.??After twenty years of failed regime change wars in the oil rich Middle East and Central Asia, the United States has chosen to withdraw.??

For the third time since 1989, it has suddenly - and without warning - abandoned another generation of men, women and children on the geopolitical chessboard of Afghanistan to the carnage of rape, torture, slaughter, starvation, warlordism, brutal medieval rule, and future conflict that the patterns of the past tell us are sure to follow.?

Since 2001, the measurable financial cost to the US taxpayer of America’s failed military interventions and regime change experiments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere is $8 trillion US dollars. This figure does not include:

• Macroeconomic costs to the US economy.
• Strategic opportunity costs of not investing taxpayer's money elsewhere.
• Future interest on borrowed money.

Brown University's Costs of War project explains how the post-9/11 wars have been financed "almost entirely" with borrowed money and estimates that "future interest payments on this debt could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s."[4]

At least 900,000 people have died directly through the violence.??Several multiples of this figure have died from the secondary effects of violence, while a conservative estimate of 38 million people (and as many as 49 to 60 million) have been forced to flee their homes. 38 million exceeds the total for all wars in the world since 1900, except World War II.[4]

Since 2001, the Pentagon has spent $14 trillion.??Up to one half of this has been paid to defense contractors, which have spent $2.5 billion on “lobbying” in this period.??In 2011, ten years into the?Global War on Terrorism, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that waste, fraud and abuse totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.4

The strategic cost of these regime change experiments to the democratic experiment in the world – and to the soul of America – remains a judgement in progress.??

Once the political theater, divisive media narratives, palace intrigue, manufactured intelligence, Machiavellian proxy conflicts dressed in the costumes of morality and human rights, and the beaming smiles on corporate brochures are peeled away, a predictable pattern of the last twenty years emerges.??It is the old theme of maneuvering for the control of finite resources – and for control of the information, narrative, financial systems, and trade corridors upon which the control of these resources depends.??

It is the?Paradigm of Scarcity.???

It has been twenty years since the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, thirty-two years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end the Cold War, eighty years since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and – most significantly at this hour in the cycles of history – one hundred and eighty years since the First Opium War in which the British Empire invaded China, seized Hong Kong, and forced the ruling Qing dynasty to re-open its economy to the free trade of society and soul destroying narcotics.??

Driven by its voracious hunger for control, Britain placed its knee on China’s neck, setting it on course for a?Century of Humiliation?and?unequal treaties?at the hands of exploitive foreign powers, including France, the United States, Russia, and Japan.[5]

In the 1700s, Europe’s demand for Chinese silk, tea and porcelain led to a trade imbalance between China and Britain.??The currency was silver – and it was flowing into China.??To reverse the balance of trade, Britain “weaponized” narcotics – smuggling opium into China to addict its communities to the drug so it could siphon silver back out of its economy.??When China outlawed opium and confiscated illegal shipments, Britain declared war and invaded.??

Britain’s military-enforced “narcotics strategy” enabled it to control trade terms and extract silver from China’s economy.??It also buried a bitter memory of Western exploitation, oppression, and humiliation deep within the Chinese psyche.?

China has a long memory.

Food, Water, and a Lesson from Rome

The production, security, and distribution of water, energy and food is in many respects the central thread of the human story on earth … the hub around which all economic, security, and foreign policy decisions have been configured since our birth as a species.

At its peak in 100 AD, the Roman Empire fed and sustained 50 million people spread across several continents.??Critical to its ability to achieve this was Rome’s network of secure trade routes and relationships that enabled food and other water intensive products to be exported from water rich regions like Hispania (Spain) and the Nile River Basin in Egypt to large population centers like Rome and Antioch.[6]??These centers lacked the water to produce food locally.??The water embedded in the food and other products they imported was therefore?imported virtually?from the outside to sustain local life and economic activity.?

Figure A above shows the metric tons of grain imported into key Roman Empire population centers in 100 AD.??Figure B below shows the tons of grain exported from water rich production regions.[7]

Based on a conservative estimate of 1,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of grain, Rome imported 90 billion liters of?virtual water?embedded in grain per year.??Notably, one kilogram of beef (another of Rome's key imports) requires 16,000 liters to produce.[8]

Rome’s trade system gave it the food, water, silver, iron, tin, timber, and the other resources it needed to grow, urbanize, mint its money, and build its powerful military – all in spite of the dry and variable Mediterranean climate.??But – as Rome’s power and consumption of resources grew out of all proportion to the resentful nations surrounding it – it also grew more reliant on trade, more vulnerable to regional shocks, and more dependent on military force, foreign soldiers, mercenaries, and increasingly distrustful allies to secure its overstretched regional interests.

As the empire expanded, Rome fell into a pattern of endless wars in complicated and unaffordable campaigns stretching across a vast geography from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates River in modern day Iraq.??To keep up with the soaring costs of these forever wars, the government debased (diluted) its silver currency to put more coins into circulation.

Limited precious metal reserves placed a ceiling on this policy as military overspending led to higher taxes, growing inflation, and a growing economic gap between a small elitist class of Romans and the Roman on the street.??

Investment in infrastructure and technology innovation dwindled as the homeland became confused, angry, divided, and vulnerable from within and without.??

With its military overextended in grandiose campaigns in faraway foreign lands, its economy crumbling from hyperinflation, its religious leaders interfering in the affairs of state, and its political system deeply compromised by corruption, Rome eventually capitulated to a combination of internal uprising and invasion across its porous borders.??

It collapsed in 476 AD.[9]

Rome’s?virtual water trade?policy within the Mediterranean region 1,900 years ago is a microcosm of our global economy today.??As global temperatures rise, dry regions get drier and wet regions get wetter.??This reality - together with population growth, expanding urbanization, and growing consumption of water to satisfy the Take, Make, Use, Waste linear economy - means nations in dry regions (like ancient Rome) depend increasingly on foreign lands to provide them with food and other water-intensive products. In a world of growing nationalism, trade wars, and unpredictable regional shocks, these "net importers" of water are particularly vulnerable.

The map below illustrates a) net flows of virtual water between major trading nations and b) the rate of water extraction VS its availability in key global economies in 2008 (a reflection of water sustainability in these nations).[10]

70% of fresh water consumed in the world is consumed in the production of food. The remaining 30% supports industrial activity and direct human consumption.??Emerging technologies offer options that did not exist in the past, but what has not changed since the peak of Rome’s power 1,900 years ago is the need for leaders with the vision, foresight, strategic discipline, and the inspirational ability needed to bring their societies together to ensure long-term availability of the water, energy and food required for economic activity and national security.

Water and climate, however, do not care about political boundaries on a map. In today's climate of political isolationism, these same leaders must be able to inspire their neighbors to grow trust and work across boundaries to solve the complex challenges before us. In today's interconnected global ecosystem, the need for this type of leader is perhaps greater than at any other time in our recorded history on earth.

The challenges that lie ahead in the next 5, 10 and 20 years are immense. Yet stories of the past reveal to us a close correlation between water, cooperation and trust. Across our history, leaders of integrity have almost always prioritized water. In nations where the water has remained clean, integrity has remained intact - and trust has flourished. Water is our common lifeblood - an irrefutable shared interest with a mystical quality that inspires people to tap into the most powerful qualities that exist within their higher selves.

Part II to follow ...?

[1]?Worldometer. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

[2]?Graves, Robert. (1938). The?Cuirassiers of the Frontier.??Retrieved from https://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3397

[3]?Butler, Smedley D. (1935). War is a Racket. New York: Round Table Press.?

[4]?Crawford, N, et al (2021).?Costs of War.?Brown University: Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. Retrieved from - https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

[5]?Fravel, M. (2005).?Regime Insecurity and International Cooperation: Explaining China’s Compromises in Territorial Disputes. International Security, 30. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137595

[6]?Diep, Francie (2014).?Ancient Roman Water Networks Made the Empire Vulnerable.?Retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com.

[7]?Dermody, B.J. (2014).?Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.

[8]?Hoekstra, A.Y. (2003).?Virtual Water Trade.?Delft: IHE Delft.

[9]?Andrews, Evan. (2019).?8 Reasons Why Rome Fell.?Retrieved from https://www.history.com/

[10] Feng, K. and Hubacek, H. (2015). A multi-region input-output analysis of global virtual water trade flows. Research Gate, October 2015. Retrieved from - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-global-net-virtual-water-flows_fig1_272021894