Global Energy Security and American Hegemony

This analysis of the United States and energy security examines the close relationship between U.S. military supremacy in oil-rich regions and America's maintenance of global power.

The term energy security generally evokes thoughts of American intervention in the Middle East to protect U.S. interests in that region's oil-rich fields. Doug Stokes and Sam Raphael move beyond that narrow framework, considering as well U.S. actions in Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa. Drawing on State and Defense Department records as well as other primary sources and previous scholarship, they show how U.S. foreign policy since World War II has sought to maintain a global energy security regime that supports the nation's allies while maintaining American hegemony.

Through their rigorous analysis, Stokes and Raphael explain how U.S. intervention in energy-rich states insulates and stabilizes those nations' transnationally oriented actors and political economies and why American oil diversification strategy strengthens the country's position against rivals in the global capitalist system. They argue that counterinsurgency aid and other types of coercive U.S. statecraft protect the recipient states from an array of potentially revolutionary armed and unarmed internal social forces, thereby securing the energy supplies of nations deemed strategically important to the United States or its allies.

Clear and accessible, this cutting-edge contemporary policy analysis will engage scholars of U.S. foreign policy and international relations as well as policy makers grappling with the importance of energy security in today's world.

Doug Stokes is a senior lecturer in international politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is the author of America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia. Sam Raphael is a lecturer in politics, human rights, and international relations with the Kingston University's School of Social Sciences.