The Future of Resources - Part 2: Questions and Challenges

Strategic Resource Partnerships (SRP’s) based on Strategic Resource Modeling (SRM) are becoming increasingly important issues for the theory and practice of International Relations. Roland Benedikter explores how the field remains to be developed.

The rise of Strategic Resource Partnerships to a crucial dimension of strategy planning and foresight as we have seen in Part 1 is particularly the case in the age of the race for the Arctic and the growing competition for geopolitical resource-rich areas such as Africa or East Asia that without SRP’s could trigger new-old resource conflicts not dissimilar to those related to the “great games” of the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, some analysts see the foundation of the BRICS development bank in 2014 in Latin America as a tool for China to secure resources in developing countries. Applying dialogical and inclusive measures while avoiding sectarianism and the clash of competing alliances on the resource question in an international perspective will be critically needed in the years ahead. Success on forging SRP’s can contribute to the positive return of international powers to a sound combination of realpolitik (where the operative focus of SRP’s lies) with the socio-political idealism that characterized Western trends in the early stages of globalization - including democratization, North-South balancing, and human rights. For example, the notion of human rights might be expanded to include resource rights in the coming years.

So what is the perspective?

To forge strategic resource partnerships as an open, transparent and international win-win endeavor will require global institutions to play a crucial role in integrating competing interests – for example between resource-rich and resource-consuming nations and their respective alliances. The United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Funds are among those bodies that stand before the challenge to develop the issue with urgency.

This is because the years ahead will be characterized by the combination of a growing world population - expected to reach around 10 billion by 2050 - with limited resource supply. Resources will be the more restricted, the more the level of demand is going to rise as combined effect of growing numbers of consumers and rising levels of quality consumption not least due to the progress of developing nations in Asia, South America and Africa. Second, due to advances in technology specific resources like rare earths will become more important both for economic and military applications, giving nations that possess and extract them greater political and diplomatic weight independent of their immediate military, diplomatic or financial power. Third, the global financial sphere will be increasingly interested in creating new resource-finance-politics clusters by tying larger amounts of investment for example from states, hedge and pension funds to the resource sector. First signs for a new “pivot to resources”, including covered operations, were the allegations of resource - and related commodity - price manipulation, in particular of international aluminum prices, against Goldman Sachs and its daughter Metro International since 2014.

In combination of these elements, strategic resource partnerships could become one of the most important contextual political factors on the international stage – both at the governmental and private sectors, and (probably particularly critical) at their intersection. With every probability, not only the financial, economic and military, but also the “classical” diplomatic significance of SRM and SRP’s will most likely tend to increase. Located exactly at the interface between economics, demography, finance, politics and the military-industrial complex, SRP could shift the traditional focus of international relations from enduring, trust- and concept-based “alliances” to that of temporary and interest-based, relatively fast-changing “partnerships”. Resource speculation by private financial enterprises, partly or fully sustained by the politics of international powers in the framework of their national interests, could shift part of traditional power politics towards new approaches. This is even more the case as there are many interrelations between resource extraction and crucial topics of development, including:

- climate change and the melting of previously frozen areas (Russian, Canadian and U.S. polar and pole-adjacent territories);

- the foreseeable end of oil as a global key resource and the potentially related end of dollar hegemony, since the dollar hegemony (and with it the pillars of American global power) was built on securing key international resource trade.

But maybe the most important “grand question” for the coming years will be: will SRP’s accentuate or mitigate inequality and existing geopolitical asymmetries? In my view, there are three hypotheses plausible with regard to this question:

1) Strategic resource partnerships will decrease inequality and asymmetry on the international level but will increase it on the national level. This means that cooperation on resources will shift the related power and profits to internationally active players, while the population on the domestic level will be torn between winners and losers of the “globalization” of the resource question.

2) Strategic resource partnerships may increase inequality and asymmetry on the international level but could decrease it on the national level. The rise of inequality in an international perspective could be supported by the assumption that the greater the mutual dependence of countries combined with widely different availabilities of capital, competitiveness and level of consumption becomes, the greater the inequality and asymmetry will become between them (Thomas Piketty). An indication for the reduction of inequality and asymmetry on the national level through the rise of resource politics could be the growing awareness of the importance of the resulting questions of redistribution and participation, as for example demonstrated by the current government of Michelle Bachelet II in copper-export dependent Chile, China’s most important provider.

3) Both theses are correct and their processes happen simultaneously. This would pose a new question: At the cost of which actors?

Taken together, the possible shift of the coming years from political-military empires to economic empires could be closely tied to the rise of the resource issue, and that ultimately means to the implementation of governmental SRP anticipatory politics. Such politics will have to consider international organizations (e.g. the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative EITI), private companies of the extractive sector, international consulting firms specialized in the sector (e.g. PWH, Ernst & Young) and, of course, members of the global civil society concerned with resource justice. Be it as it is, efficient resource strategies will not be independent from legitimatory issues related to questions of soft power.

What is our conclusion? Will the resource issue create a new multipolar world, based on old resource security strategies? Or can there be a new phase of international cooperation, triggered exactly by limited resources and a new global awareness of the necessity of their joint administration?

Overlooking the elements in play, the rise of resource issues and the complexly related questions will affect the anticipation practices of both leading and emerging powers, as well as their strategic interweavement and their willingness to long-term “diplomatic investment” to avoid serious ruptures despite political and ideological competition. Most SRP’s will be forged not primarily in the perspective of a stable and just order system, but rather as an ongoing process that will be proportional to the increasing speed of economic and social development and the necessities on the ground. The fact that SRP’s could be carried out pragmatically beyond ideological aversions, or parallel to them, could result both as a mitigating and overall de-idealizing factor.

Furthermore, given that SRP’s are a relatively new phenomenon embedded in the emergence of a multipolar global order, and at the same time a constituent part of it, they will make sure that anticipative strategies and ratios will become a more important part of international relations than ever since the oil and energy crises of the 1970s. Among the pros of the related trend could be the development of a more articulated long-term strategic awareness now also by areas which have not invested much into it like, for example, Continental Europe. Among the cons could be the potential of inducing the culture of international relations to become more Macchiavellistic and in general less inclined to altruism. Could there be a future world dominated by resource partnerships instead of values or area interests?

Roland Benedikter, Dott. Dr. Dr. Dr., is Research Professor of Multidisciplinary Political Analysis at the Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies of the University of Wroclaw/Breslau, Senior Research Fellow of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington D.C., Trustee of the Toynbee Prize Foundation Boston and Full member of the Club of Rome. Previously, he was a Research Affiliate 2009-13 at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, a Research Scholar 2008-2015 at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Full Academic Fellow of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Washington D.C. 2008-12. He is member of many political bodies in Europe and co-author of two Pentagon and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff White Papers on the Ethics of Neurowarfare (February 2013 and April 2014) and of Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker’s Report to the Club of Rome 2003: Limits to Privatization, as well as of more than a dozen books on international and global strategic issues (China, Europe, USA, Chile). He has published more than 200 publications in specialized journals such as Foreign Affairs, Harvard International Review (where he is on the Advisory board), The National Interest, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, European Foreign Affairs Review, New Global Studies, Global Policy, Welttrends Berlin and Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs. He is a frequent commentator for the newspapers Die Welt Berlin, Wiener Zeitung. Amtsblatt der Republik Österreich Vienna the Italian national broadcast RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana. E-mail: rolandbenedikter@yahoo.de.

Photo credit: PinkPersimon via Foter.com / CC BY